Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am sure Deputy Cowen will tell me to sit down shortly.

We are here to talk about just transition and the word "just" needs to be focused on. It means fair and equal and just transition is good but it is not geographically fair or equal. If you look at a county like Clare, which I represent, over a number of years we have had an incremental winding down of operations at Moneypoint and the winding back of coal burning operations. There is no just transition for people in Clare and for those who have worked in that plant for many years. There is a bright future and the Green Atlantic project and there is the prospect of 600 jobs and a multimillion euro investment. There is light at the end of the tunnel but for people in Clare and for people who wait for the development of that Green Atlantic offshore wind project, they have to wait a full decade. Given the rate of inflation and how cyclical things are, it is essential that just transition is again renewed and considered on a more geographically fair and equal basis to include County Clare.

I want to talk about turf. With the way speaking time goes in the Dáil, it is not every day you get a speaking slot on a topic you want to speak about. When I was elected in 2020 with many others, as a newcomer to the Dáil, I signed up to a programme for Government that contained many things. Some Wednesday nights I vote for things that are wonderful and sometimes there are things that I have found to challenge my set of beliefs. One thing I never agreed to in a programme for Government was to ban, in any shape or form, the harvesting or sale of turf and I am glad that proposal has been wound back. We need to tackle air pollution and air quality in the country but turf cutting in a county like Clare is dying out anyway. I know of few people cutting turf and those who do so bag it up in old fertiliser bags before selling it at the local petrol station for €5 or €6 per bag. It is a small trade that is dying out and it was mean spirited, anti-rural and all those other things to even consider banning the harvesting and sale of turf.

I want to speak about wind energy guidelines because these are also intrinsic to the debate we are rightly having about greening our economy and meeting all of our climate change targets. Wind energy is already supplying a large amount of our electricity but there has been a set of guidelines, in draft format, on the desk of the Minister for Environment, Climate Action and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, since early 2020. The current wind energy guidelines date all the way back to 2006. They are 16 years old, they are not fit for purpose and they are among the most outdated in Europe. Depending on which side of the fence you sit on, if you are in the industry and you cannot wait to build more of these and multiply them throughout the countryside, or if you are a resident who is concerned that these are too near your home with the flicker effect and the noise outputs of them, both sides of this argument need to move on with real guidelines that are meaningful and relevant to the planning process nowadays. Yet another planning file was put out in Clare yesterday with further information on a wind energy project because the guidelines are unclear and insufficient and we have planning officials trying to interpret 2006 policy against what modern standards are. It has no correlation whatsoever and I ask that the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, might move that quickly. I will do a generous thing and give some of my time to my colleague, Deputy Cowen.

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