"Green" policies are destroying this country

I respect your stance, but on the question of farmers at both present and future, the carbon farming proposal does not allow for any trading or offsetting of CO2 sequestered or stored.

Yet as we speak huge multinational companies can access the CO2 sequestered from my farm if a member state chose to auction it on the ETS, land I privately own and worked god dam hard planting forestry and looking after sphagnum moss rich bogland. I get nothing and the member state and big polluting companies get all the cream, reward and green public image.

How is this in anyway fair, its grotesquely corrupt and wrong on so so many levels.

Dublin's public transport is too much focused on getting people in/out of the city centre. Try a radial trip such as Blanchardstown (where a previous GF lived) to Parkwest (where I once worked) and anything other than a car becomes a joke.

Think BusConnect intended to address some of these issues but that seems to be stuck in the long grass.

Net Zero, along with the whole carbon credits system, is just BS that was likley designed by an accountant. Pretty sure back in the 1990s the Greens called it out for what it really was, but to me the way they have now embraced it is why I view them as pure virtue-signallers.

It's one thing to have a gas reservoir that is slowly depleted over time and then left.

Another to have one that is repeatedly pressurised, depleted, repressurised, repeatedly as we produce and then consume hydrogen over time. Most of the difficulty in transporting hydrogen is in the distribution of it, not necessarily the storage.

We also have no present need to shift tens of tonnes of helium around an hour, all over the country, as would be required with hydrogen to use it for power generation on a calm, cold day.

With warships, they started off with wind and oars. Coal allowed them to move at full steam with or without wind. Oil allowed them to do it with a significantly reduced crew while also allowing them to refuel without having to come back to port. Internal combustion allowed them to remove the massive and heavy steam plants and operate far more powerful, more fuel efficient and far more responsive ships. Nuclear took a step back somewhat and brought back the onboard steam plant but allowed ships to stay at sea for months on end, and was extremely useful for submarine use. Gas turbine brought insane power and response at the expense of fuel consumption.

In each development or iteration, it brought advancements, something better, something faster, something more powerful, something more useful.

What you want to do now with electricity is effectively go all the way back to the sailboat era and are banking on technology and solutions that simply don't yet exist on the scale required to plug all the gaps that to date have been naturally plugged with fossil and nuclear. We're on the road to zero emission but you refuse to even consider any of the other emission-free technologies out there. That just doesn't make any sense.

Biomass is a complete fudge and does nothing to reduce emissions. All it does is it allows the likes of Finland to wave the "Renewables" flag around the place while generating significant business for the forestry industry. I would assume based on the outright refusal to allow Lough Ree or West Offaly Power to convert to biomass, and the reluctance to which Edenderry Power was allowed convert to biomass, that there is no appetite within government to let biomass become any sort of major player in the power market here.

Finally, condensers provide no generation capacity - they sync the grid, that's it. If a shortfall scenario occurs, they can become extremely large draws that you risk either dragging frequency down as they try to spin back up, or you have to take offline and then find some other way of providing sync. Similarly with batteries, they do not generate, they are good for near term frequency stabilisation and the last percentile peak shaving while a slower form of generation has a chance to come online. Hence why datacentres spread their battery capacity to power key equipment just long enough for the diesel or gas generation to spin up and come online, you'd never run a DC solely off battery. It's simply not practical. The same is true for a grid.

What effectively would have to happen in your scenario is we retain all of our existing plant and convert them to hydrogen (no working example of this anywhere to date), as well as building tens of gigawatts of offshore wind, as well as building all of the hydrogen ancillary plant (no working example of this anywhere to date) as well as building significantly more interconnector capacity.

At least with nuclear you'd know what you're getting.

Who's to say hydrogen isn't a big white elephant? No-one knows, because it hasn't been tried.

Yet you want to pin the security of our grid entirely on it.

If we progress 15-20 years and are still no closer to being able to plug the gap on calm, cold days, then we'll still be burning fossil fuels by the tons having spent hundreds of billions on renewables by then.

Reads to me as nothing more than a tech start up looking for research funding in the hope they'll be able develop a product...

Speaking of which, the last time minister Ryan committed millions in funding to a company that was heralded to become Ireland's Nokia, was the Intune Networks and "Exemplar network" in 2010:

It was going to see Ireland looped in a high speed fibre network with speeds way ahead of it's time because of Intune's high speed tunable laser that could rapidly change wavelength in real time, which would have the effect of multiple high speed optical links down one single cable.

So where are we today?

Well Minister Ryan's department handed the National Broadband Plan (sound familiar?) to Three Ireland to use 3G dongles which was a total disaster, Intune and the Exemplar network found it couldn't crack the fundamental problem all the other major global telecoms vendors struggled with, and the whole thing went bust in 2014. We've now spent €3bn+ on another National Broadband Plan that won't be complete until 2027 best case and leaving those reliant upon it scrambling for any alternatives they can until then.

But hey - suddenly we're going to crack hydrogen and overcome all it's known shortcomings?

Chairman Mao has been reincarnated.

Had to drive from tipp to Dublin yesterday afternoon to Collect my wife from a hospital appointment and hit Dublin at peak traffic hour to do so.all I could think off was good luck to the lunatic greens trying to ban cars and keeping a functioning economy of real work and not some make belief stuff.