This is quite a slap in the face from Brussels for Ireland's care for the environment. It comes from the Director in charge of environmental implementation at the Commission speaking at a recent online conference.
Thread ...
1) "About 50% of Ireland's urban waste
waters are still not collected and treated in compliance with the Urban wastewater treatment
directive"

2) "Many bird species are in serious decline, and there is even a serious risk of extinction of certain breeding species"
3) "With less than 2.5% of Irish marine waters protected this represents one of the poorest records in Europe"

4) "Only 15% of terrestrial habitats are in favourable condition and over half are suffering from
ongoing decline."
5) "Despite peat extraction and afforestation being key economic activities in Ireland no Environmental Impact Assesment has been carried out for any projects in these categories." He added the suspicion that this was maybe because, "they are very important economic activities."
6) "Ireland continues to be the most expensive member state in which to make an environmental claim before the courts. And we are not drawing the attention of the Irish authorities to this for the first time. It has important consequences. And the commission will act on this"
7) He notes "increasingly aggressive stance" taken against environmental campaigners in Ireland. There is evidence of use SLAPP suits but also aggressive and negative reporting in the mainstream media and even from politicians like threatening to cut off funding to certain NGOs"
A SLAPP suit is an acronym for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. They are brought ostensibly as defamation actions but their real purpose is to intimidate or financially burden campaigners.
On the rule of law he concluded with his harshest assessment ...
8) "We believe that radical change of behaviour is necessary because it's highly unusual for an advanced society like Ireland to witness such conduct which can be seen in more polemic places in the European Union. It was a surprise for us to hear this happened in Ireland" 😳

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More from @boucherhayes

Jan 30
Journalist Murray Sayle wrote this piece about #BloodySunday just 5 days after the murders. It was spiked by Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, but fifty years on remains an astonishingly accurate account of what the Army was up to. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/…
Perhaps it was telling that it took a man from a colonised country (Australia) to recognise the British Army account for the tissue of lies that it was. And it was an unforgivably supine decision of Evans to not run the piece. Sayle did the right thing and resigned
Evans decision to withhold Sayle's research from the Widgery Tribunal doubtless also made the whitewash easier, though there was the troubling question of protecting sources. How different the course of The Troubles might have been.
Read 6 tweets
Jan 12
Four climate experts have just made statements to the Oireachtas Environment & Climate Action Committee which is considering Carbon Budgets. Some of their analysis really raises fundamental questions about whether we are getting this right at all. In no particular order ...
Ireland is subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of €2.4bn a year (CSO, 2019). At COP26 we agreed to start phasing those out, but for now Ireland plans only to produce a road map for cutting subsidies in 2024.
- Prof John Sweeney
Ireland is wealthy, educated, low population density, with great renewables potential, but according to SEAI only 11% of our energy is green. In other words 90% of it is unsustainable and we have failed to reduce our emissions since 1990.
- Prof Kevin Anderson @KevinClimate
Read 10 tweets
Dec 15, 2021
What scientists are projecting will happen to the Thwaites Glacier in the next three to five years should be front page news everywhere today.
Short thread.
The Thwaites Glacier (roughly the size of Britain) is mostly held in place by a massive shelf of ice that slows its flow in to the sea.
That ice shelf is like a chair jammed under a door handle. But now it is beginning to slip allowing the door to open.

Warmer waters are effectively melting the ice from underneath as this @nytimes graphic illustrates.
Read 6 tweets
Nov 29, 2021
47% Irish people against nuclear power. 25% in favour.

@AmarachResearch ran a poll of 1600 people prompted by this evening’s Hot Mess on @RTERadio1

We posed a number of questions 1/ Image
Q1: Should Ireland consider nuclear energy to achieve its climate change targets?

Yes: 31%
No: 42% Image
Q2: Should the govt concentrate on developing renewable sources of energy and leave the legislative ban on nuclear power in place?

Yes: 58%
No: 21% Image
Read 7 tweets
Apr 29, 2020
This story sent me down a late night research rabbit hole wondering how quarantines were enforced during the Black Death. A lot of it is still the same five centuries later.

Thread

itv.com/news/anglia/20…
In Damascus at the start of the 8th century the Arab world had already come up with an embryonic form of hospital.
They then had the good sense to build entirely separate units for the treatment of leprosy.
14th century Venetians isolated sailors on an island in the lagoon.

They hit on thirty days to see if they displayed symptoms, but then upped it to the more biblically pleasing 40 days.

40-> quarant-> Quarantine
Read 7 tweets
Feb 21, 2020
What the hell is happening to Britain?

I have been travelling to London since the eighties but I have never come across the volume and depth of despair as presently.
It has taken me until now to process something I saw on The Tube yesterday.

A man begging, reduced to involuntarily howling in exhausted anguish. Met with everything from indifference to anger.
From halfway down the carriage I could see straight away he’d been sleeping rough. But for days or weeks, not months. Only recently slipped between the cracks. He was steeling himself to say something, but the bowed heads and turned shoulders were putting him off.
Read 9 tweets

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