Energy can decide Mayo political futures and that's a fact

Energy will make and break political careers - but not in the places that deserve it most.

From the cost of living crisis, to the rising price at the pumps, to our long-overdue reckoning with renewable energy in the face of community opposition nationwide - energy will determine a great deal of our future elections, both at home and abroad.

That much is clear. What is far less clear is whether the communities bearing the greatest burden will see any political reward for doing so.

The heightened tensions of the fuel protests have abated, generally viewed as a seismic government climbdown - though one that was complicated by secondary grievances from within the protest movement, namely the perception that people who have chosen to live here are getting an easier ride than those who have been here all their lives.

Those grievances were always there. The fuel crisis simply gave them a vehicle and recent government rumblings have played into those viewpoints.

What made the protests so potent? Everyone depends on the forecourts to survive. Everyone was fed up.

Anger had been simmering through a wet, dreadful, seemingly never-ending winter, with optimism in short supply and the only rising glimmer of hope - an unlikely Irish berth at the World Cup - dashed on a night in Prague.

But protests of that scale will not be seen over the summer. Not just because those involved will be too busy. But also, a rebate scheme, derided and critiqued by the opposition, has produced in the wider public the same response that followed the pyrite scandal - well, didn't ye all get sorted in the end?

The reality, then as now, is that those impacted were left short. But once a scheme exists, however inadequate, the pressure dissipates and the political heat and media move on.

The impacted groups are weakened in the public imagination, dismissed as having had their problem solved.

This will be the same story for communities set to host wind farms. It will be a hard sell to gain wider support to oppose from those not directly affected, and what makes it harder still is that the locations chosen for turbine development are, by design, in low-density areas - the very places that have already endured decades of rural isolation, hollowed-out services and dwindling populations.

These communities are now being asked to host the infrastructure Ireland needs to meet its climate obligations, and the reward on offer is, in the words of Sinn Féin councillor Gerry Murray at a recent Mayo County Council meeting, essentially a miserly one.

Murray has pointed out that deregulation of the network has resulted in Ireland having one of the highest electricity prices in Europe - despite the wind farms already operating.

The energy, as Erris-linked councillors have noted repeatedly, goes everywhere but back to the communities generating it.

The community benefit funds attached to renewable energy projects under the RESS scheme are set at €2 per megawatt hour of generation.

Spread across a large rural catchment, it amounts to what one councillor described plainly as a pittance. Roads, services and investment - the basics those communities have been waiting years for - remain conspicuously absent from the ledger, while the local authority receives €10,000 per turbine.

There is a deeper irony lurking here that Mayo people will recognise.

The county spent years in bitter conflict over the Grid West project - EirGrid's proposed 400kV transmission line running from Bellacorick to Flagford in Roscommon, a scheme launched in 2012 and fought tenaciously by community groups and councillors who opposed the overhead pylon corridor cutting through the county's most scenic landscapes.

Fáilte Ireland itself raised concerns about the tourism impact. The campaign succeeded in scaling the project back in 2017, and at the time, many treated it as a victory.

But the consequence of an under-developed grid in the north and west is that the capacity to connect wind generation - and to derive real economic benefit from it - remains limited.

The grid that was opposed is precisely the infrastructure that would have allowed communities to bargain from a position of strength. Without it, the leverage is gone.

Opposition to new wind farms at the council chamber and community level will continue, and it is right that elected representatives voice those concerns, for they are elected by their constituents.

But those councillors should be under no illusions about the political arithmetic. In the middle of a global energy shock, with Ireland regularly reminded of its climate obligations and its dependence on imported fossil fuels, opposition to wind farms in low-density rural areas will not move the national needle.

The lesson of the pyrite scandal, the fuel protests and the redress schemes that followed each is always the same.

Irish society can look at a problem, sympathise genuinely with those affected, and then quietly turn the page - reassuring itself that something was done, even when what was done was barely enough.

That's the political reality facing Mayo's wind-affected communities.

They will battle against major corporations, a powerful lobby and public sentiment in their quest for a fair hearing.

The best likely outcome is battery storage included so that grid capacity doesn’t mean turbines will be powered down and they will keep spinning and raising funds into community benefit funds.