On Bastille Day last month, one of the guests arrived at the French embassy’s garden party in a jeep towing a trailer load of sheep, which he then released into a small enclosure surrounding a solar panel on the lawn of the ambassador’s residence. The miniature solar and sheep farm demonstrated plans for combined livestock and electricity production proposed by Neoen, a French renewable energy company with a fast-growing Irish operation, and the jeep’s driver, farmer John Fagan, on his family farm in Co Westmeath. Now the local authority has rejected Neoen’s planning application, however, leaving one of the region’s…

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