Catherine Conlon: Can you see three trees from your window?

Best practice in city design is for every citizen to be able to see three trees from their window, have 30% tree canopy cover in their neighbourhood, and live within 300m of a park or green space... how does Cork match up?

Cork City's Fitzgerald Park. A recent Cork City Council survey found that the vast majority (92%) of people want more parks and green spaces in the city while 89% want extra trees on city streets.

The answer to clean air and climate is less cars and more trees—real trees. After two years of controversy and a recent inconclusive report on impact on air quality, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at UCC, John Sodeau, recommends that the €404,000 CityTrees devices should be plugged out and dumped.

"The deployment of the five robotrees to clean up Cork City air was the equivalent of using five bathroom sponges in Midleton main street to combat flood damage a couple of weeks ago," Professor Sodeau told this newspaper.