Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

The Senator seems to have made a career of tilting at windmills. There are a couple of other allusions to Don Quixote which I will leave to one side. He is right when he states that we need to look at generating electricity by wind farms. I am currently completing the planning guidelines for wind farms and I hope to publish these in the next few weeks. However, this Bill only deals with nationally or regionally important issues that need to be fast-tracked. I do not think it a good idea to fast-track every local issue. I intend to introduce guidelines to deal with wind-turbine generators that hopefully will produce more certainty. I have been a fan of windmills for a long time.