Letters

Eamon Ryan’s natural gas storage plan

As daft as it looks

Tue Nov 21 2023 - 00:10

Sir, – John McManus tries to take a balanced view of our benighted Government’s latest exhibition of imbecility (“Eamon Ryan’s natural gas storage plan not as daft as it looks”, Opinion & Analysis, November 17th). The imbecility is clear if we examine what is being proposed in relation to a product with which everyone in Ireland should be familiar. We produce 350,000 to 400,000 tonnes of potatoes a year and import 70,000 to 75,000 tonnes. What Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan is proposing is that we should not import a particular variety of potato from a particular country (or similar varieties from others) on a regular basis, but we should import enough of this and similar varieties to build up a stock of potatoes in the event of a shortage. If these spuds are good enough when there’s a shortage, they should be good enough all of the time. And the same applies to natural gas.

The obvious, sensible and economic solution (which, of course, would be an anathema to the “green jersey” wearers) is to treat the gas market on these islands as a single market, integrate the transmission systems and, thereby, internalise the actual economic costs of the interconnectors and other import facilities in the prices in the large single market and boost the security of supply. But when did our benighted Governments ever do anything that was obvious, sensible and economic? Just as they are beginning to taper off, the Government is finally looking to allocate to a sovereign wealth fund a portion of the very limited taxation of the economic rents (or windfall gains) that were and are being generated by the tax system arbitrage antics of mainly US multinational corporations. If we had done this once these economic rents began to be generated we would now have a sovereign wealth fund the size of Norway’s. – Yours, etc,

PAUL HUNT,

Haywards Heath,

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West Sussex,

UK.