Environmental Policy
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17
============================================================

Darragh O'Brien (FF), Dublin Fingal East

On the planning guidelines, work is being done on them. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage is the lead on that process. Obviously, we feed into it.
I agree with the Deputy. Most companies in the development sector engage well with communities. After these questions conclude, I will be out in my own county, in Ballyboughal, for the opening of a very large solar farm up there. Solar energy is a very important clean resource. There are 3 GW of it in our energy system now. If we go back 11 years, there were approximately 2 MW. It has grown substantially. Households are responding as well. We have over 1 GW of rooftop solar energy installed and it is having a significant impact in reducing people's bills. I want us to do more on this. I will speak to the Minister, Deputy Browne, over the next few days and seek an update on the progress being made with the solar PV guidelines.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-17