There is a profound sense of relief and hope in seeing more independent experts and our elected representatives arrive at conclusions that support the concerns we have been raising for months. But it is worth reflecting on the human cost that is borne by our communities and beyond.
It isn’t just those volunteers who have been most visible. It is the families who have shared their time and tolerated missed evenings; the partners and friends who have listened, encouraged and stepped in when things became overwhelming; the employers and businesses who understood when work had to flex around another meeting or another deadline.
It is those who offered their expertise, those who produced films, photographs, graphics and written content, and quietly got jobs done.
Across our islands, ordinary people have given an extraordinary amount of themselves to scrutinise MachairWind. Lying on the floor because anticipating a live interview whilst also waiting for a child’s future-defining exam results felt entirely overwhelming. Youngsters home from weekly boarding who have had to share their parents’ attention with technical reports and deadlines, elderly relatives who needed care, and other island projects – including the work of trying to secure much-needed affordable housing – that just had to wait.
And there is another, less tangible cost to putting your head above the parapet in a small island community. These are places where people know one another, work alongside one another and do business with one another. Alongside making the case, we had to find the skills and resilience to have important conversations without letting disagreement damage our communities.
We kept going because we believed the evidence deserved to be properly examined. We challenged imagery presented as “industry standard”, questioned conclusions presented as “professional judgement”, and sought independent expertise even when doing so took us away from the people and projects that matter to us.
We tried to help people see beyond the carefully constructed positive narrative: the warm Gaelic name, the language of “host communities”, the community grants and local representation, and the repeated messaging that this is simply about clean energy – powerful, particularly in communities where support for tackling climate change and developing renewables is strong.
We and others asked harder questions; what the evidence actually showed about the impacts on the communities involved, whether the claimed socio-economic or even climate benefits were robust, and whether the communities being described as “hosts” had genuinely been given the opportunity to shape the development affecting them.
We should not have had to become experts in our own spare time.
By the time the detailed MachairWind consultation opened, we were already on the back foot. The developer has been able to work on MachairWind over years, with professional teams, consultants and communications resources behind it – communities do not enter the process with equivalent resources. And the imbalance begins even earlier.
W1 – the proposed site of MachairWind – was identified by the Scottish Government through its strategic marine planning process before communities were faced with the detailed MachairWind proposal. Scottish Government’s own guidance says island communities should be meaningfully engaged from the outset when decisions may affect them, yet this simply did not happen – the strategic consultation amounted to two emails, neither of which conveyed the significance of W1 for Iona and the neighbouring islands.
Consultation is not merely the existence of an opportunity to comment. It is the ability to understand what is being proposed, test the evidence, seek advice, develop an informed response and do all of that within the time available. There are businesses to run, children to collect, relatives to care for, ferries to catch and community projects which do not stop simply because a major development has arrived on the doorstep.
It is extraordinary not that people have found this challenging – but that between us, we have managed to do so much.
Whatever happens next, the breadth and depth of commitment shown across these islands and beyond will be part of what remains. People engaging deeply because they care about these places, the future of their communities and the quality of the decision that will ultimately be made. There has been online abuse, there have been accusations and there have been moments when it would have been much easier to step back. People stepped up anyway.
So the relief is accompanied by a rather sobering thought; the process may not be finished. Calls for further conversation, more debate or a balancing of competing interests may sound entirely reasonable from a distance. But from within these communities, they also raise a difficult question: what it is reasonable to keep asking of those communities who have already given so much? There comes a point when the responsibility for weighing the competing interests, assessing the evidence and making the decision has to sit with those who have the authority to make it – rather than continually asking the communities affected to do more of the work.
We are proud of what we have achieved. We should be.
We have demonstrated skills, determination, adaptability and endurance. We have shown that small island communities are capable of engaging seriously with complex, technical proposals despite it landing at our critical, busiest time. Because behind every word read or written are people with lives to live and communities to build.
We will keep doing what this process asks of us for as long as we have to.
But we shouldn’t have to.