The Islands Around Our Coast
Sunday, May 20th, 2007
While proper transport connections for the islands are vital now for survival of these communities, it is also important that we support indigenous businesses in all rural areas which have become over-reliant on the construction industry. We need to focus on traditional industries of tourism, fishing and agriculture, while looking to new opportunities in energy production in which this region could thrive. We also need to roll out broadband so that more people can work from home, keeping rural areas alive in the process. However, on the islands, the rising interest in Eco-Tourism presents some unique opportunities.
While all parties have similar promises on healthcare & education, none of this will be possible unless we prepare our economy to deal with dwindling oil supplies and a corresponding rise in energy costs.
I do not believe the main parties will meet some major strategic challenges facing Ireland today - not just rising energy prices, but also the fact that within the next few decades Ireland will have to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 60% under international climate change treaties.
We can’t do this by building motorways as proposed in the National Development Plan. We need to develop renewable energy from wind, wave and tidal power as well as switching some less profitable farmland to energy crops and artisan foods for local markets. In the case of the islands, I would like to see immediate experiments in short-rotation coppice woodlands being developed so that houses could get their heating from locally produced fuels, where possible using log gassifying stoves or wood-chip boilers rather than pellet stoves. Where there is a cluster of houses, CHP (combined heat and power) plants might produce both heat and electricity (our gas and coal-fired plants waste over 60% of their energy by not being able to utilise waste heat).
To my mind, local fuel production and consumption - particularly on an island - makes a lot more sense than producing diesel from rape seed for cars, while continuing to put diesel into our central heating tanks.
On the mainland, we need to provide fast, clean, efficient public transport and I believe we should consider rebuilding the West Cork railway, at least as far as Skibbereen. A 2005 study showed that this could be done for between €200M and €450M depending on what sort of freight it would carry - that’s between four and nine times the price of a government jet. A decent public transport system supported by a mini-bus service on feeder routes would enable us to move towards reducing our car dependency.
I often thought that electric cars would be ideal for island transport - my electric car is silent, smooth and requires no petrol / diesel or maintenance and can be recharged on off-peak electricity. Furthermore, were the wind turbines to be re-constructed on Cape Clear for example, car batteries might help to smooth the peaks and troughs of the grid that present an obstacle to integrating wind on the grid. Load management systems can be developed to manage the times when domestic appliances are used and batteries charged / discharged, and I believe an island like Cape Clear could become a micro-community within which these systems could be designed, developed and perfected.
These are all changes that would improve our quality of life and create jobs, while enabling our islands to participate in putting Ireland at the forefront of renewable technologies. If we don’t start now, I believe that Ireland faces a recession under which it will be impossible to maintain even the existing poor standards of health care and education.
I don’t believe in pre-election promises - they are made to be broken, but this is an indication of the direction we need to take.