The community on Argyll’s Atlantic island of Tiree is starting to examine the viability of a community buy out.
This is no hot-flush, emotion-led crusade but a careful examination of options and consequences, with no decision already made.
The community has described the island’s owner, the Argyll Estates, as ‘not bad landlords but not very proactive’.
The reality is that everyone who goes there, loves it – but Tiree and its sister Isle of Coll, around four hours out in the Atlantic, are too far away for anyone to be very proactive about them except themseves – and Scottish Power Renewables.
Argyll and Bute Council leaves the place much to itself. Tiree has no Community Council because the small island community just doesn’t want one and are simply not having one. This may be a nuisance for the council but in its own way, it’s a strength for Tiree. It remains the community as a whole that must speak.
Scottish Power Renewables and the Scottish Government, in the way that big businesses and governments do, cast acquisitive eyes on the place with too few votes and voices to count – they thought – and attempted to impose the most gross of all offshore wind farms on this low lying little sunshine isle.
This was to occupy between four and five times the area of the entire island, with something like 500 turbines – many 200 metres tall, surrounding and swamping the 48 metre high architectural gem of the Skerryvore – the UK’s industrial equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids; and wrapping itself around the little island from the south east to the north west.
This would also have meant a gigantic construction ashore, to deal with the power coning ashore from so massive a wind field. The height of the towers would have created a microclimate, changing the island environment and destroying its sunshine USP for visitors.
The construction, operating and servicing of these monsters would have been damaging to important bird and marine species with which Tiree is associated – the Northern Diver and the basking shark, for whom these waters are a hot spot breeding ground.
The spectacular stone port of Hynish, with its nearby cluster of stone buildings – some now forming a visitor centre – built by the Stevenson’s to support the long years of construction on the lighthouse, 11-12 miles to the south in the Atlantic would have become insignificant in this wildly out of scale proposal.
The proposed wind farm was called, officially, the Argyll Array, probably as a sop to the Duke of Argyll whose Artgyll Estates is the landowner of almost all of Tiree.
The No Tiree Array campaign, formed to fight the proposal, quickly usurped that title, successfully burning the damaging project into the public consciousness as the ‘Tiree Array’, hard wired to its actual location.
With high level knowledge, research expertise and single-minded determination, this campaign provided trips for the developers and the government at every opportunity, most of them unforeseen.
At the moment they have seen the project put into a formal limbo for a coupe of years – following some substantial revisions which, while a sign of retreat, were not satisfactory. The hope is that it may never emerge from that limbo. The fear is that this apparent withdrawal may be a tactic to protect the 2014 vote for Scottish independence.
The Scottish government may have thought there were too few Tirisdeach’s to worry about but the strength of the campaign demonstrated the spectrum of Tiree’s friends and well wishers – and the weight of objections that could be rallied from those opposed to willy nilly wind farms.
The island is home to a secure population of Corncrakes and, annually, to an equally secure visitation from a cluster of the UKs and the World’s best wind surfers, or board sailors – arriving for the week long Tiree Wave Classic. And there’s a memorable annual music festival.
The measured interest in exploring the possibility and the sustainability of the islanders owning their own place appears to be a very reasoned process on both sides.
The islanders are going to do nothing in a hurry. They’re planning a study to test the soundness of the case into the future.
The Argyll Estates would clearly not be willing sellers but are not being aggressively defensive or hostile.
This is an equally admirable, measured approach to the situation, indicating that whatever happens, agreements can be negotiated to take Tiree forwards.
