Your view: Boglands play a big role in helping the environment
The construction of more and more wind turbines threatens boglands which play their own part in helping the environment. Picture: Eamonn Farrell/RollingNews.ie
In the past, the word ‘green’ (giving the Green Party its name) meant love and protection of the environment, air, land and water, and the natural world within it.
Now the environment is thought of as the provider of ever-increasing renewable energy; wind turbines threaten, so far, largely unspoilt hills and valleys, many supposedly Coillte woodlands, and now Bord na Mona boglands.
These, just getting a reprieve from the peat industry, are now threatened with turbines and associated concrete and supporting infrastructure and transmissions.
Planning permission for a 96 MW wind farm that Bord na Mona proposed to build on bogland near Lanesborough was overturned for lack of specific details on dimension and specifications of turbines.
Justice Humphries rightly overturned Bord Pleanala’s award of planning permission.
This legal situation is happening just as a better educated Ireland was beginning to realise that bogland is one of the greatest carbon stores in the country. Let it do its natural thing and the land will save far more carbon than wind turbines can produce! It is the same question and answer as to replacing trees with turbines; neither compare with the bogs for carbon storage.
So let’s hope it leads to greater controls on other such attempts to replace long-lasting natural environmental controls with short-term, high emission wind turbines. 70% renewable was always pie-in-the-sky mathematics and a disastrous challenge to Coillte uplands, restored boglands, and unspoilt valleys.
Maybe this could be a step in the right direction; hands off the countryside and work to explain and encourage serious consideration of small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) to take the place of natural gas plant, at the moment playing baseload to unreliable part-time wind and solar; together failing so badly that all three coal generators at Moneypoint have been providing the necessary energy during one of the longer-than-usual lulls.
I am writing neither in support of the Sisters of Charity or the practice of religion, but I think a bold claim by Clodagh Finn in her article Recalling a religious 'radical' when radical action is needed (Irish Examiner, June 23) requires a serious reality check.
Ms Finn states her belief that there are two forces at work in Irish society, and that she gives her support to the one that is 'modern, inclusive, and secular'. It appears not to have dawned on her that, this week, a distressing high-profile case drew attention to the lack of inclusion accorded to an unborn child, whose perceived state of health, sealed his fate. The fact that he has now been humanised, given identity, and had his health status confirmed, shouldn't detract from the fact that there are many others who suffer a fate similar to his, but who are denied the luxury of either identity or human status.
Ireland may be modern and secular, but claims of inclusivity need to be more objectively evaluated. Unfortunately, the single narrative of the media, which conveniently ignores the possibility that the absolute nature of certain women's rights may clash with the rights of others, gives little cause for hope in that regard.
I suggest the Garda Commissioner failed to provide a proper explanation as to why the Gardai failed to respond to so many 999 calls.
His response, I suggest should NOT have been accepted by Minister for Justice.
The people deserve an explanation — simply brushing the matter under the mat — is a cop-out.
Minister, do your job, represent the interests of the people.
Much ink has been spilled on the topic of British identity in a United Ireland. Scottish independence will most likely come well before Irish unity thereby ending British identity, which is a political identity originating in the union of the Scottish and English governments and parliaments.
British identity will go the way of Yugoslav and Soviet identity after the dissolution of those political unions.
Any efforts to use the spectre of a border poll to take rights away from women, gay people, or Irish speakers to appease an intolerant rump in the Northeast must be put to bed.
I see now the is parroting British media propaganda in its article Covid-19 vaccinations: how the four UK nations compare (June 24).
In the title and the content, it describes Northern Ireland as one of the four "nations" of the UK.
The British-controlled six counties of Ulster is not a nation and never has been. A nation has a flag, a national anthem, a government, tax-raising and law-making powers. Northern Ireland has none of these.
It seems this is a line only recently being pushed by the English Tory party and BBC. Yet now we hear the same falsehoods being repeated in Irish media. A primary schoolchild studying geography could point out the error.
