Sir, – The headline to Michael McDowell's opinion piece (Opinion & Analysis, April 27th) reads "Ireland drifting towards permanent energy crisis".
It might have read “Ireland permanently drifting”.
We have been drifting not toward but in a permanent public health service crisis for the past 40 years. We have been drifting in an ongoing housing crisis for at least half of that time. We drifted on to the financial rocks in 2010, and it is clear from some current expenditure programmes that we didn’t learn a lot from that trauma. Climate change is the defining issue for our children. We all know what needs to be done but we are showing no serious interest in doing it.
What is it in our make-up that appears to render us incapable of planning for the future? Time and again we show that we can react well to a crisis – Covid and Ukrainian refugees are two recent examples. But planning to avert a possible crisis seems not to register here.
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Barack Obama said that he had left in the White House a comprehensive plan for dealing with a pandemic and speculated that his immediate successor was using it to prop up a wonky table in the Oval Office. I wonder what we did with ours. – Yours, etc,
PAT O’BRIEN,
Rathmines. Dublin 6.
Sir, – Michael McDowell writes, regarding the energy crisis, that “we need honest and urgent action led by a coherent government” and that “these things matter much more than piffle about sod turf, lettuce in window boxes, or shortening our morning showers”.
In July 1942, Sean Lemass, minister for supplies during our last time of war, spoke wisely in the Dáil, stating “that facts must be faced, and that there must be no more self-deception in this country. We all have lived too long in a fools’ paradise, and it has taken a world war to awaken us to a sense of reality.”
Be it a time of war in 1942 or 2022, we need to solve problems with reality rather than ideology.
When we most need energy to survive, we need to utilise the transition fuel assets Ireland has available to supply Ireland’s people and her economy.
There is additional offshore gas at Corrib and there is gas at Barryroe which could utilise the nearby Kinsale gas field infrastructure to bring the much-needed gas to Irish consumers.
The fact is that Eamon Ryan is refusing to sign licence and lease extensions for willing energy providers for both Corrib and Barryroe.
Our Government may consider flying away from the fools’ paradise in which they are living. – Yours, etc,
RICHARD WHELAN,
Schull,
Co Cork.