Quentin Gargan

Long time no post. Shame on me. It was a good result in the election they say - 2,860 first preference votes. In the final week of the election, all the talk was Bertie -vs- Enda. When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled, so the small parties all got squished a bit.

What happened afterwards was the interesting bit. The Greens are now in government, and I’ve had emails and phone calls both for and against that decision, though the “for” vote was in the majority. It isn’t a black and white decision. B&W decisions can be made in 10 seconds - the debate on this one in the Mansion house went on for 8 hours. I voted in favour for a number of reasons;

1) Fianna Fail were going to be in power anyhow, with or without the Greens. The only difference is that instead of being beholden to a few local interest independents, they are now also beholden to a Green agenda. Had it been a choice of backing either FF or FG, then it would be a different matter, but the figures dictated that FF were going to be heading up the next government.

2) People mostly voted Green because they wanted Green policies implemented in relation to climate change and energy. Considering that the Greens had only 6 seats to FF’s 78, they got a good deal - two key ministries and agreement to reduce CO2 emissions by 3% per annum.

Some say that people voted Green for change. That isn’t necessarily the case. The Greens never promised not to go into government with FF, and as a result many of those who wanted change voted FG first, Labour second and then Green. But remember, that given the numbers at the end of the election, FF were home and almost dry. The most change you could have got was the coalition that actually emerged.

3) I just don’t think there is five years to spare not having Green policies on energy and climate implemented in Ireland. Another five years building shoddy housing, gas fired turbines etc.

OK, we didn’t get everything we wanted on Tara, Shannon and numerous other issues. But staying out wouldn’t have saved Tara or kept US soldiers out of Shannon. The best we can hope for is that in government we will have an effect on future decisions. Lets give it time.

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.

Ah yes, the West Cork Railway. Could it ever return? I believe it could and put out a press release out on this last week. Then I finally found a report I had been looking for which put the likely cost at between €200m and €500m, so I put out a second release to counter the dismissal the proposal was receiving from mainstream parties.

Would you like to support this idea by putting a poster on the window of your car? We have a few mini-posters that you can put on your car window. You can download them here and print them on your inkjet.

Yikes! Its seven days away, there are 71,000 people in the constituency and I’ve only (!) shook hands with a few thousand of them. I can’t possibly get around the whole constituency. We don’t have a team of councillors and citizens who believe we got them their council house / pension / bus pass / planning permission and are willing to beat the streets on my behalf. So sorry blogs are so intermittent, I’m off!

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.

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).

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »