This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.
There are documents in Irish public life that age gracefully, and there are documents that simply age. The Wind Energy Development Guidelines, published in 2006, belong firmly to the second category. They were written for a country with far fewer turbines, and far smaller ones, before the present climate targets and before machines of the heights now routinely proposed. Twenty years on they remain the guidance to which An Coimisiún Pleanála and every council must have regard when deciding whether a wind farm should be built, and on Friday the Supreme Court reminded us, in the most courteous possible way, exactly what that phrase does and does not mean.
The case concerned seven EDF Renewables turbines at Killeshin Hills and neighbouring townlands in Co Carlow. Two local residents, one of them a farmer living less than a kilometre from the site, and a residents' environmental group had challenged the Commission's permission, arguing in essence that the separation distances between the turbines did not meet the guidelines. The High Court dismissed the challenge last May and refused leave to go to the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court has now declined to hear a direct appeal, finding that the case did not meet the constitutional threshold of general public importance or the interests of justice. Its central observation was a simple one: the inspector and the Commission were obliged only to have regard to the guidelines, which they clearly did.
That is a correct statement of the law, and it is worth dwelling on, because a good deal of public argument about wind energy proceeds as though the 2006 document were a statute with numbered rules that a developer either meets or breaks. It is not. Guidance of this kind informs judgement; it does not replace it. A decision-maker who reads it, weighs it and explains why a particular layout is acceptable has done what the law asks, even where a neighbour reads the same paragraphs and reaches a different view. Courts in judicial review are concerned with whether a decision was lawfully made, not with whether the judge would have made it, and the Carlow ruling is a clean illustration of that discipline.
But a legally sound decision made under stale guidance is not quite the same thing as a sound system. The Department of Housing published draft revised guidelines in December 2019, and they were never finalised. The 2024 Planning and Development Act has since introduced National Planning Statements to replace ministerial guidelines, and in a written Dáil reply in October the Minister said that a statement on onshore wind is being prepared with the climate department, that the highly technical work on noise is now substantially complete, and that a strategic environmental assessment and public consultation will follow. No date has been given. In the meantime, he confirmed, the 2006 guidelines remain in force.
The scale of what is coming makes the delay harder to defend. In the same week as the Carlow judgment, an application for the Slievegrine Renewable Energy Development, twenty-three turbines with tip heights of 170 to 185 metres between Dungarvan and Youghal, went directly to the Commission as strategic infrastructure, with a decision expected by October 2027. Projects of that size will be assessed against guidance drafted for a quite different generation of machines, and everyone involved, the developer, the Commission, the council making its submission and the families living in those townlands, would be better served by rules that plainly fit the thing being proposed.
There is a respectable counter-argument, and it should be heard. Guidance written in haste can be worse than old guidance applied with care, and the Commission and its inspectors have developed a substantial body of practice on noise, shadow flicker and setback through two decades of casework. The environmental assessment and consultation the Minister describes are not bureaucratic ornaments; they are requirements of European law, and a statement rushed past them would invite exactly the kind of litigation everyone says they want to avoid.
Even so, the conclusion seems hard to escape. The Carlow decision shows that the courts will uphold a decision properly reasoned under the existing guidelines, and that is a reassurance to applicants. It offers rather less to communities, who are entitled to know that the standards applied to a turbine outside their window were written with turbines of that size in mind. A clear, current and properly assessed national statement would serve both, and would allow the argument about wind energy to be conducted on the merits of individual sites rather than on the age of the rulebook.
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