The West’s awake. And angry. At a public meeting organised recently by independent TDs, farmers vented their opposition to the proposed Nature Restoration Law declaring that ‘farmers want to farm, not to participate in agri-environmental schemes’. Such was the hostility towards climate and environmental policies that one farmer was reported as calling for the Minister …
This article first appeared in the Irish Times on 25th May 2023 as https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2023/05/25/climate-action-should-transform-freight-and-logistics-but-are-we-prepared-for-it/ When he is not chastising economists for their obsession with economic growth, President Higgins regularly invokes the work of Zygmunt Bauman, a leading theorist of the 20th century. Bauman is noted for his observation that modernity has fundamentally altered social relations …
Climate action should transform freight and logistics, but are we prepared for it? Read More »
This article appeared in the Irish Times on the 22nd of June 2023 as https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2023/06/22/we-need-talk-about-climate-politics-mary-lou/ A climate-conscious friend of mine recently shared that what keeps him awake at night is the prospect of a Sinn Féin-led government propped up by rural independent TDs. I can go one better than that. What keeps me awake is …
We need to talk about climate politics, Mary Lou Read More »
This article was published in the Irish Times on the 27th of April 2023 here It might not feel like it yet, but there’s an election in the offing. The first of many shiny newsletters arrived in my letterbox recently. It was an impressive list of small jobs that, taken together, show that my local …
Local climate action plans offer an opportunity for place-based leadership Read More »
This article was published in the Irish Times here under the title “Rapid expansion of solar power capacity gives us grounds to be hopeful” on the 23rd of March 2023. There is hardly ever any good news on the climate front. However, a recent report by the think tank Ember found that the energy price …
This article was published in the Irish Times here on the 23rd February 2023. Former speaker of the US House of Representatives Tip O’ Neill is famous for quipping that all politics are local: he said, “everything starts at your back yard”. How to square this political maxim with robust decision-making in respect of Ireland’s …
All climate politics are local, but are local politicians up to the challenge? Read More »
This article was published in the Irish Times on the 26th January 2023 and is available here The National Retrofit Plan has already been branded as a failure by opposition politicians despite being just a year old. Is that a fair assessment? Despite the best efforts of politicians, public servants and various social actors, sometimes …
We can’t afford to let the national retrofit plan fail Read More »
This article appeared in the Irish Times on the 22nd of December 2022 as https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2022/12/22/what-goes-on-in-the-arctic-wont-stay-in-the-arctic/ For a country unused to ice, sparkling landscapes gifted to us by a cold snap bring fairy-tale conditions. Snow always comes to us as a surprise in this part of the world, accustomed as we are to dreary winters of …
What goes on in the Arctic won’t stay in the Arctic Read More »
People often ask me, how do climate activists “keep going” in the face of so much inaction and indifference? It’s a good question. In the Greek mythology, princess Cassandra was bestowed with the gift of being able to see the future, but she was cursed because her prophecies would always come to pass but no …
I recently attended COP27 at Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt supported by the Irish Environmental Network, and representing Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE). For some reason I couldn’t upload my blogs directly to this site while I was there, and they were hosted instead on the FIE website. I’m reposting them here now, and will …
@2022 Sadhbh O’Neill
