In announcing that the contruction of the plant was to go ahead, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: “Building work will start on the site this month (June) and will give employment of up to 350 people during the two-year construction phase. When in operation up to 30 people will be employed full-time at the plant and in excess of 100 will be employed indirectly in growing, harvesting, transport and other ancillary services associated with the plant.

“This investment is a vote of confidence in the Irish economy and is part of the recovery that is beginning to spread to every region of Ireland.

“It will be the largest biomass power station to have been built in this country to date and will contribute to reducing our greenhouse emissions. The overarching objective of the Government's energy policy is to ensure secure and sustainable supplies of competitively priced energy to all consumers. Bioenergy has a critical role to play in meeting our target to ensure 16% of our energy requirements come from renewable sources by 2020. In order to meet this target, Ireland is committed to meeting 40% of electricity demand, 12% of its heat, and 10% of its transport, from renewable sources. The new Mayo plant will help us meet our targets.

“The power station will burn biomass such as Willow, Spruce, Miscanthus and Mesquite, and the ‘waste heat’ from the station will be used in an adjoining fuel processing plant to refine the biomass for commercial use. This will offer a great opportunity to farmers in the region to grow biomass crops which require little maintenance and where they will have a ready market for sales.”

The plant is expected to be completed and fully functioning by 2017 and will qualify for Ireland's Renewable Energy Feed-In Tariff (REFIT) programme.

Mayo TD Michelle Mulherin said: “This project, alongside the transatlantic fibre optic cable to be built by Christmas in which Microsoft is a substantial investor, can have a transformative effect on the North Mayo economy bringing investment and jobs.

“With these synergies the site is now ripe for cloud computing and development of a data centre. As illustrated by the recent Apple announcement of a €850 million investment in a data centre at Athenry these big ICT companies want to locate in areas where there is green energy generation such as that proposed by Mayo Power.”