From top: The River Lee at Cork city centre. Air quality in Cork city is currently one of the worst in Europe.; Dan Boyle
It was twenty five years ago. I was a candidate for a by-election and had been campaigning to extend the bituminous coal ban, which had been in existence for a number of years in Dublin, to Cork City.
John Gormley had been very involved in the earlier Dublin campaign, which eventually saw Mary Harney legislate for a smoke free zone in Dublin.
Smog Free Cork was established to extend the legislation. As a local councillor I supported this goal.
The by-election was held in November. Temperatures dropped with chimneys chiming their bilious smoke. Inversion in the valley of the city magnified the effect.
During the campaign the then Minister for the Environment, Michael Smith, announced that Cork City would also be covered by the bituminous coal ban. Hoping I suspect for the type of kudos won by Mary Harney.
It wasn’t good enough for me. I had always thought that the initial, and subsequent bans, being based on the sale but not on the use of bituminous coal, could not be effective.
In Cork this meant coal could be bought two miles outside the ban zone, and then be burned with impunity. This was true of all subsequent extensions of the ban to other urban areas.
Our current government had been committed to introducing a nationwide wide ban, the only way to make sense of a sales ban.
However under pressure from coal distributors that they would legally contest such an order on restraint of trade grounds, the government has relented.
This weekend our Minister of the moment has announced a further extension of the ban to all urban areas with populations over ten thousand people. Another absolute cop out.
That this government is reluctant to regulate any market has never been a surprise. That it is failing to do so now sees it veering into the territory of negligence.
In recent months Cork has been experiencing some of the worst recorded air pollution in Europe.
There is an irony in this. This has coincided with a trial that Cork City Council has been undertaking in conjunction with University College Cork.
This has seen an increase in monitoring stations throughout the city, along with more pollutants being measured. The irony being that the more we monitor our air quality the more polluted we are discovering it is.
The Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for the official air monitoring in the city. What this trial is revealing is that we have too few monitoring stations and that they are badly located. The same is probably true throughout the country.
To be fair the science and technology of all this is difficult to keep up with. We are learning more about which pollutants that are most damaging and at what concentrations. Technology is helping us measure these risks more accurately.
Domestic fires represent only part of the risk to our air quality. The expediential growth of vehicular traffic represents another significant area of risk. All we have succeeded in doing with much our new road infrastructure has been to move air pollution pinch points to new locations.
The biggest failure has been any real, sincere attempt to address fuel poverty. Our poorest households continue to rely on the least expensive, least heat efficient fuels.
Without massive retrofitting we will to condemn those with least to suffer the highest concentration of air pollution. Reducing the need of many to get up early in the morning….
Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle
dan, I dont comment too often on your articles but I do always read them – and enjoy and find them very interesting. thanks and happy xmas.
By all means ban smoky coal but only after a same price alternative is in place. “Address fuel poverty”, Climate justice my butt! Apparatchiks like Boyle along with his party don’t give a damn about addressing fuel poverty. They are happy to rob from ordinary decent tax payers in a filthy money grab with additional useless carbon taxes. If carbon taxes worked c02 would have dropped worldwide and it hasn’t. Does Boyle not think it’s a bit ironic and totally hypocritical of him coming from a party that inflicted huge damage on tax payers pockets when they were in government by encouraging diesel cars and for far too long, to ensure they got their ministerial and TD pensions, they gleefully kept their Fianna Fail masters in power to destroy the economy. Boyles bull droppings about “vehicular traffic” and their panacea for fixing it is to move to electric cars whose production creates more c02 than regular cars while raping the environment for rare earth metals extracted by child labour for battery production. Of course Boyle and his party’s idea of powering electric cars with intermittent renewables is a farce as the joke renewables have to be constantly backed up by fossil fuelled power stations due to their lousy intermittency of wind power. All electric cars succeed in doing is moving air pollution from the tailpipe to the power station. All Boyles support for a smoky coal ban will do is hurt the poorest and increase fuel poverty.
People are dying from the air pollution, but sure, go off.
You’d prefer they die of hypothermia?
Prefer if people worked out that it’s a pretty dreadful and unnecessary choice, death by pollution or death by hypothermia.
I’d prefer if the state and its agents obeyed the law and stopped trying to tell me what I can and cannot do in my own home.
But there you go…
So long as you kept all the smoke from your coal fire inside your own home, I’d be fine with that, too.
You don’t own the air.
Neither does the state.
The air is a public good. We need it to live, which it can’t do while people keeping pumping it full of poison. The idea that government has no role in regulating what is pumped into the air everybody in the country breathes is quite radical, and rightly belongs on the same sort of lunatic fringe as Freemen Of The Land and Qanon and such.
It’s not that simple. It’s about balancing the fundamental right of people to seek shelter and achieve modern levels of comfort on one hand while establishing the complementary risks to human health by burning polluting fuel on the other. Please provide some contextually relevant facts in both sides of the debate so we can properly evaluate your white knuckle internet rant
We either take action or we’re in trouble. It’s that simple. Everything else is party politics.
What does ‘we take action’ mean and what are the consequences?
Action means steps to mitigate and reverse climate change. Consequences will be the mitigation and reduction of climate change.
Well said
Good article, but i dont agree with the end. Ive note that the people burning wood/coal fires are middle class wanting to live the hygge lifestyle. THese middle class have gas and oil. Its far more economically efficent to burn oil and gas rather than send all the heat and smoke up the chimney.
Im surprised more lobby groups have not put pressure on government on air pollution. A dublin bus driver sitting in the polluted city must have black lungs by this stage. Where is the bus drivers union.
GAA clubs around the country training on november evening breathing in the filthy smoke from chimneys. Why havent they said anything.
Bizarre generalisation
Around the country in rural areas most people totally depend on locally sourced cheap fuel
Cork. It’s a swamp. Next..
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/green-party-meps-back-proposal-to-remove-irelands-eu-tax-veto-38805187.html
Ah yes, The Greenies – selling us out in Europe now. Three cheers for the Dan Clan.