Residents, a number of whom live within a few hundred yards of the planned 29 new turbines, claim they’ve been left twisting in the wind by the arrival of 295ft-high blades on their doorsteps.
“Apart from the 29 being built on the edge of the village, there are another 14 in the pipeline for Taurbeg on the other side of Rockchapel, seven more for nearby Rockhills, six at Glentanemacelligott and nine in Caherlevoy just over the border in Limerick,” says Jack Roche, the chairman of Bruach na Carraige, a local heritage centre.
“When they’re built, the view from the village on three sides will be obscured by these giant blades. Locals have been refused permission for houses because of the area’s scenic beauty, but there seems no problem building a wind farm. When they’re built, who will want to live here?” There are 43 more clusters of turbines dotted around rural Ireland, according to the Irish Wind Energy Association, with many more coming to a field near you. Airtricity, the biggest player in the market, announced last week that it would double the amount of renewable energy it supplied to the national grid by building four new farms, one each in Cavan and Wexford, and two in Limerick.
Many more are in the pipeline, despite routine objections by local residents. “Barely a fortnight goes by without a decision on a wind farm coming before the board,” says Diarmuid Collins of An Bord Pleanala.
To passers-by, wind turbines make for an oddly serene backdrop, standing sentry over deserted swathes of the country. But homeowners worry not just about the sight of them but also about noise and their properties being devalued.
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Evidence of the latter has already emerged in Britain. In January 2004, Barry Moon bought a four-bedroom home in rural Cumbria, unaware that a wind farm was planned for a nearby hill. Moon took the vendors of the property to court and, after hearing evidence from chartered surveyors, the judge awarded him €21,800 on the basis of a 20% reduction in the value of his house because of the visual impact and the annoying, low-frequency hum of the turbines. “I lived a similar distance from the M3, but this was a lot worse. What was irritating was the way the whooshing kept increasing and decreasing in magnitude,” he said at the time.
Environmental groups such as Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) lament that wind farms seem immune from regulations preventing building in beauty spots. “To be economically viable, they have to be sited in exposed, hilly areas and it seems to be too expensive to set up off-shore. They are increasingly tall, so there’s no real way to disguise them. Because of our dense, rural housing patterns, there are relatively few areas left with no houses where they can be built,” says Stephen Dowds, an independent planning consultant from Galway.
Dowds points out, though, that there has been no swell of public opinion opposing the construction of wind farms, despite their growing presence. In 2003, tree-felling to make room for a 73-turbine wind farm, the largest in Ireland, at Derrybrien, Co Galway, caused a landslide that was described by the European Commission as “an environmental disaster”. Locals formed a co-op to halt further work, but lost their case in the High Court last year. An Taisce has won some minor victories, preventing construction along designated tourist routes, but with the government planning to produce 13% of the country’s energy needs from wind power by 2010, the winds of change seem inevitable.
“Most of them are so remote that it hasn’t become a big issue yet in Kerry, but we’ve seen at least one house sale fall through when the buyers discovered that a field, about 800 or 900 yards away, had been designated as a location for a wind farm. It put them off, even though nothing had even been built,” says John Daly, of Sherry FitzGerald Daly in Kenmare.
Noise, described by nearby residents as a low-frequency hum combined with a “swishing”, seems to be the biggest bugbear of locals, but some fear that an ill wind is blowing. GPs in Britain working in communities where wind farms have been erected have claimed that the low frequencies emitted by turbines may cause headaches and depression among residents living within a mile radius, although the British Wind Energy Association disputes their findings.
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In Ireland’s Draft Guidelines for Windfarms, soon to be published by the Department of the Environment, it’s claimed that “noise is unlikely to be a significant problem where the distance from the nearest turbine to any noise-sensitive property is more than 500 metres”.