"Green" policies are destroying this country

I'd have absolutely no problem with a nuclear plant in my back yard. If it came with community incentives all the better, though that wouldn't be a showstopper one way or another. A bunch of well paying jobs and a reliable electricity supply would be incentive enough. Having just dealt with a neighbour from hell taking four years to build a simple extension I'd prefer to be far enough away from any construction noise, but anything above 500 metres would be fine with me. I'd happily campaign in favour of it. Not everyone has absorbed the Green paranoia about nukes.

Try telling the population of a county that you're going to bury 3 million cubic metres of toxic waste containing heavy metals in their soil, protected only by a plastic membrane. Oh wait, that already happened in County Clare from coal burning at Moneypoint. The ash storage facility was full by 2014 and an additional 1.6 million cubic metre facility needed to be built.

At full usage, Moneypoint can burn a giant 100 tonne railway car of coal every twenty minutes, seven thousand tonnes per day. The daily energy equivalent in uranium is the size of a bottle of coke. One day of Moneypoint output is 20,000 tonnes of CO2. The ash output is toxic forever due to heavy metals, and ten times more radioactive than the fuel used in a nuke to produce the same energy. And it's being dumped straight into landfill.

Why aren't there people marching on the Dáil to protest? Possibly because they haven't been fed the same diet of propaganda in relation to other fuels as the anti-nuke stuff?

The green lunatics won’t be happy until they turn everything outside of the m 50 into one massive national park.Leo has no interest in fighting for his country when it comes to the eu.

I had already predicted people would say they would have no issue. You seem to own a house, you are happy that asset would be worthless? Even if you are still paying a mortgage on it.

In terms of paying jobs and reliable electricity, well we already have that don’t we? When was the last outage not caused by a storm? 30 years ago?

Green paranoia, I think you will find the paranoia has to do with the 2600km2 which is inhabitable for 20,000 years.

Moneypoint is planned to close, so we are dumping wastage from creating electricity and the big plan is to create another power station with even worse output to dump? I suggest a different angle because that one will do the opposite to what you think it does

Never forget Chernobyle was actually hours away from rendering much of western Europe uninhabitable. The outcome of that accident was a lucky escape.

Ireland farms primarily for export. Yours is a tired old argument which doesn't actually reflect the reality of Irish farming. The sad fact is we could stop farming in Ireland tomorrow and no one would starve. That's a situation I would like to see change - but it would require a wholesale move away from beef, lamb and dairy production.

Oh I know but I didn't want to go too overboard.

Bingo this is a huge problem. We are exporting food while importing food at the same time. If people want to reduce CO2 and "save the planet" then it's a lot better if they eat the food produced in Ireland than shipping in the latest craze food they seen on the web.

This does not require a wholesale move away from what we already produce, well in my opinion anyway. The conditions in Ireland suit the production of some foods and not others. We should be moving more towards food that are in season to eat etc. Yes this will mean less selection in shops but we are all supposed to be saving the planet

I would be interested to see what you think we would change to when you mention the wholesale move away? what did you have in mind?

A country without farms has no future. Yes they could import for a period of time until something goes wrong like a war. Then everyone starves over one winter. Protecting farming is non negotiable for any responsible country.

The issues with pollution coming from farms has been 100% driven by decades of government policy. Another area of incompetence. Bashing farmers is unfair. Better government policies and funding of farmers to implement these is the way to go. Getting rid of beef and dairy in Ireland would actually be another incompetent damaging decision due to the nature of land in Ireland so that really needs to be ruled out as an option.

Considering that there were cracks discovered in the Belgian nuclear fleet some years ago and in the French fleet last year, but no widespread power outages resulted - that's a pretty baseless claim. Almost all have been repaired and returned to service since.

We've had more system alerts to date on days wind underperformed or was non-existent and rode our luck (some data centres were turned down) so you're own question back, how long do you want to be without electricity for?

What an insular and indeed hypocritic view. I'm assuming then that you only consume food grown elsewhere?

Let's say we do stop farming our quality produce in Ireland. That food is consumed somewhere so there are consequences. Similarly, what if wherever your coffee bean, grape, avocado, fig or whatever else we can't produce here takes a similar attitude. Most likely it will result in higher prices as other suppliers strive to fill the gap, likely increasing production in less favourable conditions elsewhere (rainforest deforestation or similar) and potentially longer shipping routes. That's in a world trending over 10 billion people.

But yeah, Ireland should stop farming because a few idiots on the Internet think it'll reduce global carbon footprints. Last time I checked, you can't eat rewetted bogs or a few pine trees.