A piece in today’s Irish Times by Donal Buckley has irked me sufficiently to put fingers to keyboard this morning. The sub-heading for the piece reads: ” Putting Ireland out of business is no answer to climate change”. The gist of his piece is that the economy should come first, always. This kind of attitude is rampant throughout the nation, whereby the economy has been deified and venerated to the point of nausea. We are constantly being preached to on ‘competitiveness’, ‘dynamism’ and ‘going forward’ (as if we’d want to go backward, or even worse, left).

Buckley states: “…we must meet our imminent Kyoto obligations in ways that do not undermine our economic and social progress”. Firstly, what social progress is he talking about? The modern, efficient health system? The affordable housing? Also, how could improved environmental policy be detrimental to the ‘social’ aspect of society? Secondly, there is no doubt that stricter environmental policy will have a negative impact on commerce and industry in general. Economic prosperity and development, via the model we have chosen, tends to deliver consequences for our environment that are unsustainable. The point is that we simply cannot meet our Kyoto targets without adversely affecting industry.

Increasingly, there are certain sectors which are benefiting from improved environmentally-friendly technology. Take tourism for example, a hotel in Inchydoney has recently installed a wood-pellet burning system. However, the manager of the hotel seemed more interested in the economic advantages of the system rather than the positive environmental impact. What I’m trying to say here is that nothing which is seen as environmentally friendly will be adopted unless it is economically friendly at the same time. This attitude must change if we are to meet our Kyoto targets, it must also change if we are to leave our generations to come with a healthy planet. After all, economic damage is a lot easier to repair than environmental damage.

El Commandant P.

Published by Colm.