© South Wales Evening Post - 7 September 2005
There is enough wind coming from Councillor Ioan Richard these days to generate a wind farm of his own. The guy is obsessed with wind farms, or rather preventing their existence.He used to say in a very rational tone that the problem with the energy debate was that we have been grossly ill-informed about global warming.
And a letter in the Smallholder Magazine a year ago paid tribute to the Mawr councillor for presenting a "cogent case against wind energy while avoiding the rather hysterical and discourteous language of others who have opposed this technology..."Alas, several months on and the councillor now finds it impossible to refrain from being hysterical and using discourteous language.
Now, Tan8 is the Assembly's Technical Advice Note which steers wind farm developments in certain directions, including Mynydd y Gwair on Councillor Richard's doorstep.
Councillor Richard has read all 60 or so pages of the Tan8 document, but points out that he finds it too depressing to read a second time.
He said he missed one important aspect - that the words "tourist" and "tourism" never occur once throughout.
"I find that appalling to say the least," he tells Assembly chief planning officer Kay Powell in an email.
The Independent councillor then nicely gets his comeuppance when the planning chief in Cardiff informs him that he got it wrong.Tourists and tourism do appear in Tan8.
So we have to assume that Councillor Richard did not read the Tan8 report very avidly or he did not read it at all.
How does he respond to being pulled up by one of the Assembly's most senior and respected chief officers?
He puts out a press release describing the Assembly as an asylum and the people running it as lunatics.
But that is pretty tame stuff compared with the accusations he makes in another email.
The councillor refers to a story of a giant tropical sunfish hopping into a boat in West Wales.
It is a nice quirky story, he says, but it is nothing new to find such fish in the temperate West Wales waters.
The point is, he stresses, the presence of a large sunfish is not grounds for certain political factions to claim it is further evidence of global warming.
He refers in the same breath to Plaid Cymru and the Greens.
I cannot repeat the nasty and unwarranted way he describes the Greens for it could be actionable, and I am not able by law to perpetuate a potential libel.
Martyn Shrewsbury has made a formal complaint to the Ombudsman over the "offensive" language used by Councillor Richard who has become known by his political opponents as the Mawr Mouth. I wonder why.
