Madam, - It was with a sinking heart I read that Greencore is proposing to "redevelop" its former sugar factory in Carlow into the usual sorry combination of "business park and commercial and residential centre" (The Irish Times, November 22nd).
This dismisses the obvious solution, for the good of the nation as a whole, of converting the plant to the production of bio-fuel from sugar beet or other sources. Presumably the same ghastly fate awaits the Mallow factory as well.
It is surely a cruel irony that the Brazilians, whose cheaper sugar has put our own out of business, themselves use more than half their crop for bio-fuel. What are we thinking of? Are we so enslaved to the dismal economic theories of the late and unlamented Milton Friedman that, even in the face of manifest ecological good sense, we cannot bring ourselves to interfere with "the market" to the extent of making bio-fuel production worthwhile?
It is only a case of adjusting taxation rates, but plainly the mandarins in the Department of Finance have defeated any impulse that Minister for the Environment Dick Roche or anyone else in Government might have had to do that. And now, alas, oil prices are on the way down again, and we will relapse into idiotic complacency for a while longer. - Yours, etc,
JOHN DILLON, Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus), Trinity College, Dublin 2.