"Green" policies are destroying this country

Roderic O`Gorman may be getting it in the neck at the moment over the asylum system but I don`t believe people are looking at it as solely a Green Party s**t show. I believe the reason it has calmed down here of late is because for some time now it has become very difficult to defend many of the Irish Green Party actions and the realisation that their proposals on electricity generation in particular are untenable..

As has been said here often, barring a change to the constitution, which would required a referendum with a majority voting to pass, there is no legal restriction on a government to changing or scraping anything brought in by a previous government. Under the present plan the 2050 emissions target is a non-runner. We are not going to be spending upwards of 75% of our GDP on a plan that nobody can put a cost too, or if it would even work to scale.

Its going to be so interesting to watch the Greens (and to be fair a lot of politicians from the other parties who've gone along with their nonsense) as we get closer to 2030 and are nowhere near our targets.

To meet the 2030 target our emissions had to reduce by 4% odd a year every year this decade, but so far have mostly been increasing (up 12.3% in 2022 alone!). At the moment 2030 is still two election cycles away so the issue is being ignored, but we haven't a hope of coming anywhere near a 51% reduction. Current projections have us at about 20-30% by then - and thats largely from hitting relatively low hanging fruit like electrifying cars/buses, home retrofits, adding some wind/solar power, increasing carbon taxes a bit etc. And even at that the Greens have hemorrhaged support.

When the Greens in the 2028/2029 start preaching that we need to bring in more drastic, much more punitive measures, its going to go down like a brick with the population at large. I wonder at that time will the more mainstream parties then relax on the environmental agenda.

At the end of the day in economics it all comes back to that old saying, "money talks, bullshit walks"

The German government, the mother and father of this green wind revolution that is in large part to blame for much of the present European energy crisis with their reliance (and their often bullyboy tactics of attempting to encourage others to do the same) on Putin`s gas as a transitional energy source, are cutting their Climate and Transformation Fund for 2024 by €12 Billion with further cuts of €33 Billion between 2024 and 2027. And that is a coalition government that includes greens in a country that was the economic powerhouse of Europe.

I don`t think anybody really believes at this stage that the economics behind this present plan are viable. If they do then they have not shown how they believe it is. It doesn`t really matter that much who is in a future government. Economics is like tailoring, you have to cut your cloth to suit your purse.

Really disappointing article in the Irish Times. It perpetuates the myth of an urban rural divide in Green Party support, with rural areas being anti Green Party.

The reality is that the vast majority of urban areas are anti Green Party as well. You only have to look at their pathetic polling figures.

Well the fact of the matter is that the modern Green Party here is an urban party, they pursue policies that service and address the needs of urban living. And have given up really on rural Ireland. Malcolm Noonan's base for example is Kilkenny, a large town. So it's not a myth to say they hope to elected from the green leafy suburbs. The bite there is that increasingly rental and purchase of property is a problem for middle class adult children and whilst there are many causes, boosting the population with tens of thousands of new arrivals annually ain't helping.

This is the bit I don't get. The Green agenda would be hopeful of reducing air travel alright but in theory the Greens should be hugely behind domestic tourism, the staycation etc. The paradox is that they've been busy shafting domestic rural tourism this past year and two. I don't think they understand the effects on towns like Killarney. Sure the rich Yanks & well paid politicians & public servants can still stay there and play golf. But those visitors with less disposable income have been frozen out by the conversion of cheaper accommodation to refugee use.

Catherine Martin is Minister for Tourism. I can't recall a single announcement that I came across in the past year from her, supporting domestic tourism. I've heard her on about culture and artists etc - but domestic tourism, she's missing in action completely afaik.

Even IF Ireland and the EU ever achieve "net zero", i bet it makes no difference at all to global temperatures. I anticipate we'll then see them fully pivot to the next gimmick : Carbon sequestration.

Gas being a transition fuel was always BS. Coal powerstations needed replacing and economics favoured gas over everything else by a country mile. Gas happening to have lower CO2 per MWh was used as some cheap virtue-signalling.

Is there any limit to the stupidity Ryan talks about?

so they hike up the tolls and force cars to drive through the cities and now he wonders why? They built the most expensive children’s hospital in the world, and those who will work there will have their parking space removed? Is this geezer for real?

Wrong. They are all currently wedded to it. The green have been in government 9 of the last 18 years. There's no major reason to think they won't be back next time around. It's probably the current trio or SF and some small looney crew

Take a screenshot at 4am and see how many trans Atlantic flights are transiting Irish airspace, even if we reduced incoming flights, there are still a huge amount of flights flying through "our air". We'll be the best boys in class as usual, while international partners do as they please.

Again all that matters are the KPIs. Whats the old adage...what gets measured gets done