Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is welcome to the House. I do not intend to go back over what my colleague has so eloquently put together regarding Derrybrien. I visited the site, was driven around it and walked part of it. Even with the best will in the world, there is absolutely no way of returning Derrybrien to what it was pre-development. There is just no possibility of that. There are 25 km of roads there, fibre optic cables are running from turbine to turbine, and there is an entire information technology system that manages each one of the turbines. Indeed, those who manage the turbines and the engineers who look after them can activate a turbine from their homes. They do not have to be on site but can monitor those turbines from home. As my colleague, Senator McDowell pointed out, there are 70 turbines producing 1% of the entire electricity needs of the country. The site itself is now in pristine condition. The area where the mudslide took place is totally overgrown and nature has recaptured it. Incidentally, it is not the first bog slide there ever was in this country and, in some cases, no development had taken place so it is a bit of a nonsense to totally blame the development in Derrybrien.

At present, two turbines per day are allowed to be turned on for a short period to ensure they do not seize. I understand there is interest from as far away as Africa, Denmark and Finland in these turbines, which will ultimately be sold for scrap because that is all they are. Yet, these turbines are almost 99% efficient when they run. The area they are in makes an ideal nature reserve. It is the sort of place where there could be a greenway, while the turbines are active. We could have a nature reserve there. To prevent turf cutting there in future, what should happen is those who own bogs on the site should be paid an annual sum of €1,000, €1,500 or €2,000 a year for the next ten or 20 years to compensate them for the loss of their turf.

The people I spoke to locally have no problem with Derrybrien. I started to think about how we got to where we are. The analogy I will give concerns the bus stop for Corrandulla village, which was identified by Transport for Ireland. It made perfect sense. A bus stop was going to be put at a certain spot on the map until somebody actually drove the distance. It was 10 km form Corrandulla. No pensioner was going to walk 10 km to get the bus into Galway. What happened was that a decision was made at a desk. Nobody on the ground went to see what was happening. Similarly, in Derrybrien, one officer from the planning authorities went on site and was supportive of it. Nobody else has gone there. None of the people in Europe who put on the pressure to have this mattered considered by the European Court of Justice visited the site and none of them has seen the site. No one from the European Court of Justice has come to the site so nobody knows what is going on there.

We talk about planning laws. That is what this is all about. If there is an attempt to dismantle Derrybrien, I will be the first person to put in an objection under planning laws because we cannot remediate. The foundations for individual turbines have to go through bog down to hard ground. In some cases, that is several metres. How do we pull out several metres of concrete and replace it with turf? How do we do that? How do we take out 25 km of road and replace it with the turf that used to be there? How do we take out the fibre optic cables? The national grid that is feeding into that site has to be taken out of it.One resident in Loughrea told me that there is a hospital and a few nursing homes in the area. The resident wondered why, surely to God, Derrybrien could not be used to generate the electricity and give it to the hospital and nursing homes for nothing. I think the amendment that we have put forward addresses some of those issues. I have spent a lot of time on the Committee on European Union Affairs over the last seven or eight years. There was a lot of talk in Europe about subsidiarity and trying to bring decision-making back to the individual member states. Then we get decisions like this. Is it any wonder that people are turned off the European idea when there are bureaucrats in Brussels, Strasbourg or wherever making decisions about something they have never seen, based on one environmental incident? My colleague is right to state that the fines that were imposed on the contractors at the time were ludicrous. They were absolutely ridiculous. The State picked up €17 million of the cost.

This amendment makes perfect sense. My real plea today, in seconding the amendment, is for the Government to take a step back and think about what we are doing. As my colleague stated, we cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube. There is no way on God's earth that Derrybrien can ever be returned to where it was. Why not turn it into a benefit to the nation? We are going through an international energy crisis and there are 70 turbines in Derrybrien that are switched off, sitting and waiting to rust away. It is absolute insanity. That is why we are moving this amendment. I hope the Minister of State will accept it. It makes perfect sense. It will allow situations like this to be appraised in a much better way.