Can Mayo afford to say no to renewable energy?

Driving up to Dublin from Galway en route to Croke Park, it's hard not to notice that alongside the stellar road infrastructure, you're met by pylons and the steady heartbeat of our national grid.

All the energy in this country, it seems, is destined for the M50 before it gets used anywhere.

It begs the question: at a critical juncture, with the world beholden to the unilateral strikes of a madman in the White House who can derail global energy markets, sign peace deals to settle them and then rip up ceasefires at will, can we really afford to turn our back on generating our own electricity?

The answer, uncomfortably, is no. Ireland is already on course to miss its own targets, and it will come at a cost.

The State met its baseline renewable target of 16% back in 2024, but government's own figures show we are projected to fall well short of the interim marks for 2025 and 2027, against an overall national ambition of 43% by 2030.

Ministers are now examining whether to pay other EU states for a "statistical allocation" of renewable energy we failed to generate ourselves - in effect, buying our way out of a problem we could be solving at home, in places like Mayo.

In the past two years we've watched people turn to generators to survive long power outages during storms.

We've seen jerry can sales hit record highs as households stockpiled fuel. And now, in a heatwave summer, water butts are the must-have item as homeowners try to beat hosepipe bans and drought conditions.

Our climate is changing, and the way we consume electricity and water is changing with it - both trending toward extremes we are not yet built to withstand. Self-sufficiency is now becoming a swift necessity.

None of that means the objectors are wrong. I have sympathy for councillors and community groups who have rightly raised concerns about planned windfarms in their areas.

They've watched other parts of the county host turbines and see little in return, and they're understandably wary of the same deal: 180-metre blades spinning over their hinterland for the benefit of everyone except them.

What's needed is common sense from windfarm operators, objectors and the State alike. Somebody - a forthright politician with genuine conviction, or a proper public campaign from EirGrid itself - needs to explain plainly why power, pylons and grid reinforcement matter for Mayo.

A Sligo Chamber of Commerce submission to EirGrid's own ‘Shaping Our Electricity Future’ consultation made the case bluntly: years of underinvestment in transmission infrastructure in the west, including long delays to the planned 220kV link into Mayo, with more than 3GW of renewable projects sitting in development limbo across the west of Ireland, waiting on a grid that isn't ready for them.

That is enormous potential capacity going nowhere while Dublin data centres soak up the headlines.

The stakes go well beyond keeping the lights on. IDA Ireland's own internal papers, released under Freedom of Information, have warned that grid connections simply aren't available for new energy-intensive investment, and that the shortfall is costing the country billions in lost jobs projects.

When investors weigh up rural Mayo against somewhere else, the first question isn't about housing supply or the strength of the local GAA club - it's how reliable the grid is.

Those are the jobs that let people stay in Mayo, raise families here, and keep small communities alive.

That's precisely where we're falling short, and where we risk becoming a backwater for future development. In Erris, there would be far less opposition to turbines if infrastructure came with them - proper roads, not scraps.

Instead, the areas hosting windfarm development have mostly been left with shadow flicker and resentment for their trouble.

Small modular reactors may well be part of Ireland's future energy mix - there's already a live debate, with voices in engineering circles arguing our current strategy is divorced from reality - but at the pace of Irish public delivery, don't hold your breath for the next decade, never mind this one.

For now, Mayo needs its grid upgraded properly: not just costly, underpowered underground cables, but real reinforcement that will position us to play a serious role in offshore wind and in Ireland's wider energy transition.

Take Crossmolina. The €34 million flood relief scheme now under construction has delivered a new diversion channel and bridges to protect the town after decades of devastating floods. It shows what's possible when the State commits properly to infrastructure.

Yet the route now proposed to bring turbine components through the town - via the community field and a new bridge over the Deel to skirt narrow Hickson's Corner - looks for all the world like a temporary fix, not a bypass or beneficial in any sense of the word.

Given the persistent traffic problems already choking Crossmolina, why has nobody put a genuine bypass on the table, one that would take Erris-bound traffic out of the town and cut journey times between Belmullet and Ballina and allow for mammoth turbines to pass through with ease?

That would be development worth having, a mirrored benefit for local people. Instead, a town that has been more than accommodating through its own flood relief works is being asked to now host the safe passage of turbines at the cost of a community field and in return merely see a hastily built bridge across their river and a road with no lasting benefit.

Communities that carry the weight of the energy transition deserve better than that –and so, frankly, does Mayo's future.