Cork politicians say planning guidelines for solar farms urgently needed

By Peter McCarthy, Corkman

The government needs to hurry up with its promised guidelines for solar farm developments as local authorities such as Cork County Council are being inundated with planning applications without any proper regulation in place to guide their decisions, Cork councillors have said.

Councillors were responding to a letter to the local authority from the office of the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage James Browne which acknowledged that “there are currently no specific planning guidelines in place in respect of solar energy developments.” The letter added that the department has begun “an initial scoping process” for the creation of guidelines, a process which is at “an early stage.”

Speaking at this week’s meeting of Cork County Council, Cllr Ann Marie Ahern said that in East Cork “we are being blighted with an inordinate amount of submissions for solar panel farms. There are no guidelines which we can follow. It's imperative that the government actually addresses this immediately given the Celtic Interconnector and the serious amount of applications being sought, public meetings being held by groups and approaches being made to landowners to put solar panel farms in place.”

“It is taking away from our agriculture, it's taking away from the livelihood of people, it is impacting hugely on communities. I think it's imperative that something is done by government sooner rather than later.”

The East Cork councillor said that the due diligence and workload being put on the council’s planning department by the volume of solar farm applications is unfair.

“They don't have proper regulation and legislation to refer to and regardless of a decision being made by Cork County Council we're then faced with it being referred to An Bord Pleanála [now An Coimisiún Pleanála] and an unknown decision based on what certain people in An Bord Pleanála believe because there are no guidelines, no regulation and no legislation in place,” she said.

Cllr Peter O'Donoghue called for a moratorium on such developments until the proper guidelines are put in place. “What we're essentially doing here at this moment in time is we're putting the cart before the horse. We're railroading these large-scale industrial developments into County Cork with no proper planning guidelines in place. We can't continue to do that.”

“Remember we live in a lovely county with the best agricultural land in the world and to see thousands and thousands of acres of that land turned into an industrial zone is an absolute crime so I'm calling for guidelines first, developments later and a moratorium now,” the Fermoy councillor said.

Cllr O'Donoghue said that the council has “made the right and proper decisions in my opinion” regarding solar farm applications “but the issue is then that this goes to An Coimisiún Pleanála and they overrule Cork County Council. We know what's going on on the ground, yet this body above in Dublin who don't have a clue about County Cork overrules the decisions made by Cork County Council, that’s a big issue here.”

Council officials responded that the council is obliged to accept all planning applications so a moratorium is impossible. They said that until the promised solar farm guidelines are produced, the council will continue to subject all planning applications to “robust consideration” in accordance with the County Development Plan and any relevant national strategies and guidelines.

The council agreed to write to Minister Browne calling for the creation of the guidelines to be expedited.