Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to briefly respond to what Senator Higgins quoted from the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union. I fully accept that you cannot have a situation where people benefit from ignoring the law and they get a slap on the wrists and that is it. However, there has been a poverty of imagination as to how we should deal with the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It was possible for us to enact special legislation to deprive the developers of the benefit, to take it into community or national ownership and to somehow extract any benefit whatsoever from the people who breached the law. By the same token we could compensate the community for the absence of compliance with the law by depriving those people of the benefit of it. I wonder whether anybody has asked if we can bring in a special Derrybrien Bill and state that this wind farm will be vested in X or Y, that the original developers will be deprived of the value of their investment and that the State, the community or Galway County Council will be the beneficiary of the commercial value of what has happened. The destruction of the wind farm could be avoided in this way.

Let us be clear about another matter. The Minister of State's party, the Green Party, is a champion of wind energy and there are ambitious programmes for offshore and onshore wind energy. Prior to the last election, every Member of this House was bombarded with what I consider to be misconceived propaganda against wind farms across the country. The propaganda purported that wind farms caused everything, from every disease and psychological trauma you could imagine to every damage to flying birds and all the rest that you could imagine. Looking at my in tray on my emails, I got tired of this constant bombardment from what I considered to be misconceived hostility to wind energy. Most of us would prefer to see all the turbines placed 40 miles out in the Atlantic, where we cannot see them, and most of us would prefer to have them on somebody else's mountains, hills or bogs but let us remember that the transformation that is envisaged by 2030 and 2050 is a process. I have mentioned toothpaste and tubes and there will be some damage to the environment. I have no doubt that in the next five or ten years somebody will come out and say that valuable migratory routes for this whale or that whale may or may not be endangered by offshore wind installations.I have no doubt that this is going to happen, and I have no doubt that there are people who will find snails and all sorts of lichens and things like that on the sites of virtually anything that is done.

One must break eggs to make an omelette. In the context of the radical revolution to which the State has committed itself in the context of energy generation, the transformation in the kinds of energy we use, and the way in which it is generated, all of that is going to have some environmental consequences. One cannot, therefore, have the purist ideological view and say that because a breach of European law took place, there is absolutely nothing that the State can do about it. If this had happened somewhere in Spain, Denmark or elsewhere in Europe, I fancy that the relevant legislature would have responded by saying "Right, this is a real mess". We have had to pony up €17 million in fines. The courts have fined the perpetrators a total of €2,500, which is ridiculous. In these circumstances, rather than remediation and a refusal of substitute consent, there is a legislative route to deprive the developers of what they have done and, at the same time, not to just simply fly in the face of common sense by ordering the destruction of turbines and the entirely futile project of trying to return this bogland to the state it was in before. The bog slide happened before the development took place. I hope that somebody is listening to this.

Legislation could be drafted and passed now to say that we are not going to knock this down, that we are going to dispossess the developers of the benefit of it, and that we are going to nationalise or communalise the facilities there in order to minimise the disruption of the environment that would be involved with further works at the site. This would help the much bigger, broader and more noble cause of reaching our energy targets in a sensible way.

I take on board what Senator Higgins said to the effect that we cannot reward people, that we cannot give people a slap on the wrist and that we cannot allow people to have the benefit of what they have done. However, we are the community and we are still a sovereign State. I do not believe that the European Court of Justice would rule it unlawful for Ireland to say that the community at large wants to dispossess the developers of their wind turbines and to preserve those turbines in situon the basis that this is the best way to remedy the damage that has already been done to the environment and the damage that was done to the community by the circumvention, albeit innocent, I believe, by An Bord Pleanála and others by their failure to demand an environmental impact assessment.

In that spirit, I really believe there is a way out of this mess. There is a European Court of Justice decision and we cannot reverse that. There is the An Bord Pleanála decision from which there is no appeal unless somebody could bring a judicial review. I do not believe, however, that this is possible. There is the alternative route. While I may not be the Attorney General anymore, if I were, I would put my thinking cap on and I could draft legislation that would not impose an Alice in Wonderland piece of nonsense on us that would destroy infrastructure, which, as my colleagues have said, nearly everybody thinks should be there and generating electricity, simply to show that we should take European law seriously.