Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)

The Minister is restrained in what he can say. He is the Minister for agriculture, not energy and communications. I take his point about solar that the Department is providing for rooftops. That scheme is very much welcome. However, we are seeing the landscape transforming in front of our eyes. I took my kids for a walk in Leamlara in east Cork a couple of months back and as far as the eye could see, there was panel after panel in what was probably the most productive land in the country. That is the concern we are expressing. We are not saying we are against solar farms; we are clearly not. They are as necessary as wind energy. A large, industrial biodigester was built in my area of Little Island a numbers years ago. Nobody objected to it. The community was actually in favour of the proposal and supported it because it was necessary infrastructure. However, we are expressing the community's genuine concerns about hundreds of thousands of acres. The Minister’s concern should be about the knock-on effects on the agricultural and food sectors. There is a scoping exercise and there will be a public consultation on the guidelines, but we are all here long enough, so let us be honest about it - that will take two or three years. Meanwhile, there will be dozens more of these applications with essentially no guidelines in place. That is the most concerning thing for us.

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