You are Niamh Corrigan, Chief Sustainability Officer of Tuatha Renewables, a wind and solar developer based in Galway, Ireland. On Monday 9 March 2026 a national newspaper publishes an ecological review of your flagship wind project, and by evening the parties who backed it want incompatible things. Before you design anything, you have to decide what kind of dispute this is.
The situation
Tuatha operates 480 MW, has another 600 MW in its pipeline, employs 310 people and earns EUR 168 million of revenue. An infrastructure fund holds most of its equity and presents it to its own investors as its flagship environmental holding. Tuatha built community-benefit funds and local co-ownership into its projects before either was standard, and the sentence in every tender says so: it is the developer communities trust.
Sliabh Bán, a 90 MW wind farm, is consented, 40% financed and expected to return a margin of EUR 48 million after costs and risk; the fund has EUR 140 million committed to it. The review says the consented turbine layout would damage about 14 hectares of protected peatland that the townlands below treat as part of their history. It contradicts an assessment from two years ago, signed by you. Your engineers put the cost of moving the turbines clear of the bog at anywhere from nothing to EUR 22 million.
By evening the positions have hardened. The local committee, about 1,200 residents and a heritage group, wants the project stopped or moved; its chair asks you: "If we object, will anything actually change?" The fund can live with a decision it can defend to its own investors, not with one that loses the returns and the trust together. The environmental organisation is split: one side wants the peatland protected, the other points out that cancelling would forfeit about 180,000 tonnes of avoided CO₂ a year. And the site foreman has 220 people waiting on a start date.
The construction drawdown terms lapse in 45 days. A credible challenge to the ecological assessment could freeze the project for 12 to 18 months. In 2023 you told 90 people in the parish hall that they would be heard before anything was built. The chief executive hands you the file with one instruction: whatever the company does, it must be able to stand over how it decided.