Sir, – Speaking at University College Cork recently, former president Mary Robinson quite rightly castigated US president Joe Biden for issuing more oil and gas licensing permits than Donald Trump.
Closer to home, it would be interesting and informative if Ms Robinson, given her widespread experience, would share her views on the Irish Government’s current energy security and climate policies.
Ireland, without any natural gas storage, is scrambling to bridge an immediate shortage of more than 600KW of electricity generating capacity. According to many experts, this is leading to alerts and probable outages, depending on demand and the vagaries of the weather over the coming winter. It is also, bizarrely, dependent on the goodwill of large private electricity consumers to plug the gap in cases of emergency.
Ireland has about 5GW of installed onshore wind capacity, which is notoriously unreliable and intermittently generates about 35 per cent of Ireland’s electricity.
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The remaining 70 per cent or so is generated mainly by natural gas, 30 per cent comes from the fast-dwindling Corrib field and 70 per cent is imported from Britain and across thousands of kilometres from Norway with a huge carbon footprint.
During the last three weeks and for prolonged periods over the last few years, because of the absence of wind, nearly all of Ireland’s electricity was generated by fossil fuels. The problem was compounded by the recent decision by the Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan to go cap in hand and sign a long-term agreement with the British to supply 100 per cent of our natural gas supply.
Having fought for centuries to win our independence, the irony was lost on Mr Ryan as the Coalition, led by the nose by the Greens, are now happily handing over control of our most vital energy security to an increasingly dysfunctional, unreliable and chaotic British political establishment.
It is beyond comprehension that an Irish government today would choose to ignore our own cleaner indigenous energy sources and refuse to grant further licenses to progress the Barryroe and InishKea fields just off the coasts of Cork and Mayo.
Together, these proven low carbon fields would ensure energy independence and security for decades, as we move snail-like to install more renewable capacity.
The current energy policy defies logic, common sense, economic sense and most of all environmental sense.
– Yours, etc,
JOHN LEAHY,
Cork.