Wind farms and a crucial EU directive

Sir, – Further to Stephen Collins’s attack on the “well-heeled” and “self-interested” residents of Killiney (“Campaign against wind farm off south Dublin coast is classic Irish protest movement”, Opinion & Analysis, September 23rd), a few months ago I attended the same Killiney Community Council meeting about the wind farms, as did the four local TDs he mentions.

Personally, I have no objection to having wind turbines in my view, whether onshore or offshore.

What did alarm me was the evidence that neither the State nor the TDs had done their jobs, and the lack of transparency that surrounded the whole issue.

This project has been around for more than 20 years. Yet no effort has yet been made to do what, as Stephen Collins later acknowledges, is required by the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive of 2008, namely to make independent environmental surveys of Ireland’s precious and rich seas, to make the findings public, and to use them to designate Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

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On this, Ireland is far behind other EU countries, and even my usually delinquent native land, the UK. To borrow his phrase, the suspicion must be that this failure has been deliberate.

What this means is that no one in officialdom can yet prove whether the Kish and Bray banks are worthy of designation, nor any other area. Biodiversity, the issue which Stephen Collins wafts aside as “fake”, is actually at the heart of what the EU directive requires, and which Ireland has signed up to.

At last, in July, the framework legislation was passed to allow for the designation of MPAs, and thus for this process to start, at least a decade late. It is TDs who have not ensured that this work was done years ago who are guilty of delaying wind-farm development, not local residents, who are just demanding transparency and proper governance.

By the way, Stephen Collins is also out of date. He asserts that the project will involve 145 turbines with tips 160 metres above the sea. The Dublin Array website says the proposal is now for fewer turbines, up to 61, but with tips up to 310 metres high. – Yours, etc,

BILL EMMOTT,

Killiney,

Co Dublin.