At last! The campaign is on. Happily the first major debate between candidates in Cork South-West will be on climate change and Ireland’s response.
Duncan Stewart is coming to Bantry tomorrow night (Monday 30th) as keynote speaker in a debate between candidates from all the main parties. The debate will be chaired by Paul Cunningham, RTE environment correspondent.
Regardless of your political allegiance, this is an opportunity to influence the policy of all T.D.s on this issue. The meeting will start at 7.30pm on Monday (30th) at the Westlodge Hotel in Bantry.
On the doorsteps tonight, I met a couple, both architects who recently moved here from Germany. They don’t plan to stay. The brand new house they are renting would be regarded as a tent on most of mainland Europe. Shoddy building standards, double glazing with a nominal and ineffective gap between the layers of glass, and poor levels of wall and floor insulation etc. They had hoped that with our current economic boom, they could work on quality housing here, but now fear that there may not be much of an opening for that sort of thing with developers.
Why would developers bother? The current standards aren’t even policed. When SEI inspected a number of houses in 2005, they found that less than 2% of them were fully compliant. The report was quoted in the Sunday Tribune and in Construct Ireland, but it has never been published. Why not?
God help the people who will have to live in these houses for the next 60 or 80 years - assuming they last that long of course. By having lousy standards and then not even policing them, not only have we sentenced these people to 40 year mortgages, but we are throwing in desperate fuel poverty as well.
If we can build passive houses that need no heating whatsoever, why do we build houses any other way? Fingal Co. Council has introduced a building code on its Local Area Plans that insists that houses be built 60% more energy efficient than the building code, and that they get 30% of their energy for water and space heating from renewable sources. According to Construct Ireland, this won’t result in increased house prices because they are maxed out to what people can borrow.
Dunlaoghaire Rathdown recently proposed doing the same in its County Development Plan. A submission from the Department of the Environment suggested that this might be too onerous. Eventually it was watered down to 40% and 20%. In the background, I can hear the faint clinking of glasses at a certain tent in the Galway Races.
I’ve never been a great fan of posters on lampposts, and would be a lot happier if there was a total moratorium on them by all parties, but of course the big players who can afford to swamp the area with them would never go for that.
First out of the traps this year is Christy ‘never-mind-the-Litter-Act’ O’Sullivan from FF. He didn’t chance putting all his posters up - just 15 to 20 around the outskirts of each main town - enough that if the council whipped them down on Monday it’d not put a dent in the total stock.
I reckon that the long-suffering electorate has to look at all our ugly mugs for long enough, without one of us jumping the gun to get some exclusive exposure on the lampposts of West Cork. I asked the County Council’s Senior Engineer whether they would press charges, especially since it is a member of the Co. Council that has broken the law. He said it wouldn’t be worth his while because the judge would probably let him off, it being so close to the election.
He did suggest that since it is litter, we could take them down ourselves - in the same way that one might pick up rubbish off the street, I guess we could take some of Christy’s rubbish off the lamp-posts. They cost him about €8 each by the way. Dublin Corpo takes them down with a long-reach tree clipper.
This podcast is a quick rundown of the electric car, and can be seen on my website or directly on youtube
Some folks have spotted it on youtube already. I’d parked it there not realising it would get spotted so easily. Not having broadband (still!) haven’t been using youtube much….
After a quite a lot of filming on a really windy day, the first podcast is up and running and can be found either on youtube or on my own homepage.
Yes, I know its all about energy and nothing else, and I’ve seen some flak on the blogs that I’m only interested in the environment. The Green Party has tremendous social policies on issues such as health, education, pensions etc. I’m sick of saying that we should be ashamed to be one of the wealthiest economies in Europe with the lousiest health care, crowded classrooms and so forth and pensioners living on a fraction of the minimum wage.
But everyone is promising to fix all that. Lets be clear here - this is the time of a deluge of promises, and all the main parties have now promised tax cuts as well. How do they do it?? (I don’t mean fiscally - I mean with a straight face).
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Question: “Why is it that developers who are so keen to support a political party don’t leave money to them in their will?
Answer: “Because they want their rewards in this life, and not in the next one.”
That has to be the quote of the day from “It says in the Papers” on RTE. Afraid I don’t know which paper it was in…
What with the various tribunals, there were all sorts of ethics regulations brought in to limit the likelihood of money corrupting politics. Naturally they included a few flaws to ensure that they were entirely ineffective, such as;
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I always wanted to write headlines for tabloids. The burning issues are rubbish and gorse - they’re both going up in smoke. Lets start with the rubbish….
An ESRI survey commissioned for the EPA showed that 42% of households burn rubbish, and that this increased when the pay-by-weight refuse charges came in. That’s five out of twelve families! People surveyed willingly admitted to doing this, so obviously they don’t know that it is illegal, and downright dangerous. I regularly see galvanised bins with a chimney lid for sale in Bantry.
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Many of us feel frustrated at the corruption in politics and a national agenda set by big business to the detriment of ordinary citizens. But today the environmental consequences are perhaps the most important issue.
Global warming is a huge threat, oil stocks are depleting, and we just can’t afford yet another election in which the environment is either ignored or spun. That’s pretty much the reason I’m running for the Greens in Cork SW. I haven’t been particularly political in the past - I’ve almost always voted for whoever was in opposition, (only to be disappointed when they won).
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