Letters to the Editor: Renewables plans need local input
Some 6,000 acres across the region are now approved, proposed, or expanding into vast solar and battery storage complexes. Stock Picture: Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA
East Cork is being industrialised by stealth. Some 6,000 acres across the region are now approved, proposed, or expanding into vast solar and battery storage complexes. When projects in planning, pre-planning, and land options are combined, the total footprint is likely between 5,000 and 7,000 acres.Â
What began as isolated renewable projects has escalated into a continuous industrial energy corridor, stretching from Knockraha through Leamlara and Midleton towards Inch and Killeagh. Some sites are already on second and third expansions, yet no cumulative impact assessment has been undertaken.
This is not small-scale climate action. It is the large-scale transformation of a productive agricultural landscape that underpins businesses such as Ballymaloe, Ardsallagh Goats Cheese, and Ballycotton Seafood. Communities who have lived here for generations are watching the industrialisation of their surroundings with little meaningful consultation.
We are being asked to accept one of the most concentrated solar industrial zones in the country without clear emergency response planning for fire, flooding, or battery failure. There is no long-term strategy for panel disposal, and serious hydrology and flood-risk concerns for Midleton and surrounding areas remain unanswered.
Meanwhile, under the renewable electricity support scheme, taxpayers subsidise guaranteed returns for private developers while rural communities absorb the impact. Most astonishing of all, there are still no specific national planning guidelines governing industrial-scale solar developments.
East Cork is not anti-renewable energy. We support responsible climate action. But climate policy cannot become a blank cheque for unchecked industrialisation.
Proper planning, cumulative assessment, community engagement, and balanced development are basic standards. Decisions of this scale should not be made about communities without them.
Niamh Lawlor
Leamlara, East Cork
Mike Sheridan (“ Irish politics is showing symptoms of the US culture wars”, February 27) argues in your paper that Trumpism will be wirelessly exported to this country. While this is possible, there are still some significant cultural, political, and geographical differences between Ireland and the United States. Some of these are differences of degree but they are differences nonetheless.
Educational standards in the public school system in the US have been deteriorating for decades due to underfunding. The US news media relentlessly prioritises the exclamation points of noise, conflict, controversy, and excitement over the steady accumulation and analysis of important facts. For obvious geographical reasons, the US has enormous difficulty regulating immigration at the points of entry. The effect this has upon voting patterns in US elections is perennially underestimated by European observers.
In recent decades, the North American free trade agreement and US trade policy in general have exchanged indigenous jobs for cheap consumer goods from overseas with devastating consequences for the American middle class.
During and immediately after the global banking collapse, the troubled assets relief programme and the copious corporate welfare distributed to the culprits who caused the great recession disgraced US institutional life in the minds of many US citizens.
With its decisions in cases such as citizens united, the US Supreme Court has practically legalised bribery by adjudicating that corporations are effectively people and that donations of money to politicians is effectively a form of free speech. This has simultaneously undermined people’s trust and confidence in the US Supreme Court and in the political system itself. The partisan political way in which supreme court judges in the US are selected and appointed has been all too obvious since Gore v Bush in 2000.
Finally, every available indicator shows that Irish voters hold positive principled attitudes and a resilient pragmatic attachment to the European Union at a time when one of the central driving narratives of Trumpism-for-export is that the EU should be attacked, disrupted, and dismantled.
I am a lifelong admirer of the United States and its people. The Pax Americana that prevailed during the first 50 years of my life was far from perfect, but we will miss it when it is gone.
A low, dishonest decade in US politics has done enormous damage to that country’s standing in the world and to the world itself. It is crucially important to distinguish between a president and his people. American leadership on the global stage has been benign by the generally horrifying hegemonic standards of history. One only has to imagine China in its place in order to appreciate America.
We must pray that house and senate Republicans do not through pusillanimity and lassitude propel this appalling president much further. The Rubicon to preserve uncrossed will be the presidential term limit that exists under the US constitution. It is there in black and white for anyone to read.Â
If the Steve Bannons of this world have their way, the US will have anarchy at home and abroad while the world will have a doting and addled octogenarian third term of Trumpism. None of this appeals to the average middling Irish voter who prefers to live in less “interesting” times and who still tends to decide our elections.Â
That’s what we call common sense in this country and long may it continue. We do have a few independent politicians at local and national level who are flirting with the Maga brand at the moment, but I have faith in my fellow citizens and I am confident that they will see that skewed, destructive, divisive, “mad for clampar”, noxious, narrowing noise for what it is.
Michael Deasy
Bandon
Mature students now comprise a massive cohort of the student body.
I am one of those. I [believe I] speak for all of those, and the vast majority of non-mature students, when I say we would much prefer shorter days or classes moved online.
A lot of classes are just presentations and someone reading from a presentation. We can do that ourselves and learn more in our own space.
Perhaps maybe in city universities there is more of a student life but as for rural universities like Mayo, Donegal, perhaps Athlone, we are all travelling to get to uni. It’s hassle, and many of us would prefer not too.
Emma Leah
via email
Many Western media sites have been rightly preoccupied with the fourth anniversary of the start of the invasion of Ukraine by the monstrous Putin, and the terrible and pointless loss of life of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and 15,000 civilians. Putin proceeds also to heartlessly use his own people as cannon fodder.
But Western media interest in the essentially continuing war in Gaza during the “ceasefire” seems to have fallen off a cliff.
Perhaps this reflects a turning of public attention away from Gaza, as if the war had ended, and onto the political scandals generated every day by Trump’s ridiculous antics and the ripples caused by the release of the Epstein files and the sinking of so many reputations on both sides of the Atlantic.
But the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank continues unabated.
The Bondi Beach attack and the death of 15 innocent Jewish people at the hands of Islamist terrorists caused appropriate horror around the globe. But the death of 618 (bringing the total toll to 73,188) Palestinians in Gaza since the start of last October’s ceasefire raises little interest and minimal reporting and a dearth of opinion pieces recently. Are we that empathy — fatigued about Gaza?
The EU as a body has been disgracefully passive at best and some EU member states have been at worst complicit with Israel throughout the war. Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas have given very poor leadership regarding Gaza and this will be a stain on their future legacies if justice prevails.
The US policy towards Israel and Palestine is bizarre as evidenced by the crackpot Board of Peace and the appointment of Mike Huckabee, an extremely partisan evangelical Christian Zionist, as US ambassador to Israel/Palestine. All this has granted Netanyahu’s administration impunity to continue to commit war crimes in Gaza and continue the internationally illegal annexation of West Bank land.
This week, the foreign ministers of 19 countries issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s move to extend its “de facto annexation” of the West Bank by dispossessing Palestinians of their land where proof of ownership cannot be proved and where many hold land for generations from a time before legal documents existed. This further cancels the hopes for a two-state solution.
The powerful Western nations have either done nothing or have actively done harm to hopes for a two-state solution.
Cynthia Carroll
Newport, Co Tipperary
