We need sugar plants instead of incinerators

Monday, February 08, 2010

PERMIT me to ask some simple questions of the Government and its partisan Planning Appeals Board? Where is the validity to classify hazardous toxic waste incineration as "national strategic infrastructure" when:

1.The only entity actively seeking it is understood to be a foreign incinerator company with clear vested interests

2. Industries needing incineration have them in-house anyhow

3.The plant is proposed for a site cheek by jowl with our National Maritime College – both up a cul-de-sac with clear inherent dangers?

Would it not have been far more important to have classified our sugar factories as national strategic infrastructure when they could have been economically converted to supply all the biofuels Brussels now demands we add to our petrol?

The Government is now considering biofuel imports instead of strategic security and balance of payments. Industry Minister Mary Coughlan and quite a few others appear to need lessons on how to join up the dots to see the real picture.

The Government never properly considered all the options of the EU sugar reform.

We still eat sugar, but the Government failed to evaluate our sugar factories, letting them be sold off to Russia. Now our farmers don’t know what to grow to make ends meet.

AJ Navratil
Chairman
Irish Biofuels Initiative
Ballinacurra House
Midleton
Co Cork

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, February 08, 2010