Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There was much trumpeting of the recent auction for the contracts for offshore renewable wind energy. I do not really know why there is any celebration whatsoever of the fact. What it is, in fact, is an auction to privatise our wind resources which is shameful and is a hostage to fortune. We know in many instances that the private consortiums and companies that are involved can just decide to pull out. They have us over a barrel when we give them these resources because our ability to deliver on our renewable energy targets and, therefore, to deliver on our climate targets are, in effect, in the hands of investors and private companies, which are often financed by hedge funds. That is who we are handing over our precious renewable energy resources to in an auction.

I do not know if there was a little bit of clever game playing going on, in that we have these dire warnings that the price will be shockingly high. It then does not end up quite as high as that but it still very considerably above the EU average and above what, for example, was achieved in Scotland. It makes it sound like it is good but in fact it is very costly. In any event, all the benefits are going to private companies which then have us over a barrel.

In the first instance, I am utterly opposed to the privatisation of our wind resources. It is absolutely wrong and it makes us very vulnerable to whatever those private companies and consortiums and their investors and so on want to do at some point in the future. What we need is the State driving this. When I say "the State", I mean insofar as the State is supposed to represent the interests of the people, so that the benefits would derive to us rather than to big, private companies. That is the first thing.

Second, the Government was put under enormous pressure to bring in a plan-led approach because it had not designated the marine protected areas, it had let the developers decide the sites, and under enormous pressure it then said it would bring in a plan-led approach from now on but not for the relevant projects. These companies are getting in under the wire and are going to go ahead. That is absolutely wrong because the scale of what those relevant projects are, which are developer-decided, not plan-based and not based on what protecting a marine environment and biodiversity is about, is what they wanted. They put pressure on the Government but all they are interested in, let us remember, is their own bottom line. That is not acceptable.

If we look at the area of sandbanks, for example, we are talking about massive turbines at very close proximity to and on sandbanks, which, as the EU has stated, need to be protected. I have talked to the fishermen who have said they will be effectively destroyed by this. They have said that the Kish and Codling sandbanks are the spawning grounds for shellfish and fish, that they are also a natural reef protecting the east coast and that this is going to destroy them.

This runs counter to the report produced by the European Parliament in 2021, for example, and there are probably a whole number of directives, which state that fishermen are supposed to be involved in the decision-making process and decisions are not supposed to be made that would negatively impact them. The fishermen have said that what is happening, even now at the surveying stage and so on, is that it is death by a thousand cuts. They are being ridden roughshod over.

This is not sustainable development and planning. It is still the developers dictating a massive development that could be very disruptive of biodiversity. If biodiversity is destroyed, any gains you claim to be making on climate change will be cutting off your nose to spite your face. The biodiversity emergency is absolutely critical, as is the health of our marine, to dealing with climate change.

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