Winds of change for energy needs

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind…” so sang Bob Dylan in the enigmatic verses of his lyric on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, an album released in May, 1963.

Blowin’ in the wind was a song much loved by my generation. What the blowing wind was an answer to then was unclear, intangible as the wind itself, metaphysical, one might say, a thing of the spirit. Now, an organisation called spiritofireland.org tells us that the wind is the answer to Ireland’s economic malaise.

Wind and water, that old duet, will, they say, together provide clean energy for ourselves, plus a huge surplus marketable overseas. Harnessed in team, they will create thousands of jobs, energy independence in five years, a saving of €30 billion spent on fossil fuel imports, a slashing of carbon emissions and a potential €50bn to add to our economy: all this is claimed for the wind-and-water projects put forward by spiritofireland.org. It is to be hoped that our embattled government will not waste a day in investigating the potential and facilitating the project if it is worthwhile.