Ireland must grasp the climate nettle

Ireland, along with most of the rest of the world, is now committed to legally binding targets to reduce the rate of climate change. 

We don’t yet know what this will involve, though we do know we will part of a common EU strategy so we won’t be able to develop our own policies in isolation. It’s also quite obvious that this is going to involve quite radical changes in the way we do things and to the appearance of our countryside.

It also seems fairly obvious that a key approach must be off-setting our carbon emissions from transport, power generation and agriculture by creating carbon sinks. Bord na Mona could play a crucial role in this. It owns 80,000 hectares of land. This is a lot, it amounts to almost the size of Co Louth.