“Reducing chronic lung diseases by improving air quality is woke tyranny”
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If memory serves me correctly the smoky coal ban was introduced by Mary Harney. The air quality in Dublin in the late 80s was diabolical and people took to wearing masks in winter high pressures
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The greens can’t take credit for this, they can take credit for sky high electricity prices though.
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It’s a pity the TFK awkward squad weren’t around to tell them that face nappies were useless wokey nonsense.
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which will be coming down thanks to the Greens
the wind auction will make such a huge difference to price & emissions - its such a great success
weirdly, it wasnt introduced across the whole of the free state
That won’t be passed onto the consumer.
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of course it will mate
dont be so afraid to hear good positive news -its ok to feel happiness
October 31st 1990 if memory serves.
When we’d be playing football after school on the Fifteen Acres you’d look across and there would be an incredible pall of smog that would hang over Ballyer in the October or November air (cc: @peddlerscross). It was there quite a lot in the mornings too. I remember mornings where you could barely see out of the bus going to school as it went down Le Fanu Road. When they were building the Chapelizod bypass from around 1987/88 to 1990 the smog would come down into the valley in the mornings and last until lunchtime at least.
Then it all ended literally overnight.
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Eat bugs and you will be happy.
No no I believe the savings will be passed on and that energy will be cheaper here in a few years. Definitely.
It’s not like the greens would ever promise you something and not deliver
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I worked in and out of Dublin at the time and recall the ban coming in. The smog was incredible really, hard to describe now how bad it was. Your clothes were dirty, any nasal discharge was a dirty grey/brown, visibility was poor. Like an industrial revolution town of the 1800s is described
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Can anyone do the necessary?
I think it affected my health without me properly realising it. I constantly had sore throats and colds or a blocked nose and days where I’d be sneezing constantly. My parents thought I had asthma and I was put on a Ventolin inhaler for a while. I always seemed to be sick with something. We got one bath a week if we were lucky in those days. The concept of washing yourself simply didn’t exist to a child in late 1980s/early 1990s Dublin. I didn’t properly grow out of the sneezing until about 1994/95.
https://www.rte.ie/archives/2018/1022/1005890-smog-in-dublin/
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Saying goodbye to the Aga just the start of my retrofit problems
It is generally agreed that turning one house into two homes is a social good where feasible, so my daughter and I are dividing the family home. It addresses the housing emergency in a highly practical fashion and appeases the guilt of an ageing widow content to remain in the neighbourhood that has tolerated her for 40 years, in a house filled with happy memories but now far too big and impractical for one person.
But the outlay is frightening. There will be no glass cubes or extensions, no luxury hotel-style showers or designer kitchens with the wow factor. By far the greatest amount of the scary total is being sunk into insulating an unwieldy 1950s house that comes with roof tiles poised to fly away in a gale, a seized-up oil-fired heating system and a 75-year-old Aga cooker installed when there were regiments of family and farm workers to feed several times a day.
The huge Aga, built to run on anthracite before an oil conversion in the 1970s, has long been a source of existential guilt. It remained the sole cooking source for a succession of families including this one, working off a gravity oil feed and so required no electricity.
Generations of laundry
It dried generations of laundry via an overhead clothes line operated by a pulley system, had a handy warming plate that thawed out hundreds of animals, birds and humans over the decades and supplied just enough general warmth to keep the ice from settling on dodgy windows. Awestruck American visitors reckoned that Wilma Flintstone had probably cooked on something similar. But for all its bulk and exasperating temperature volatility (heavily influenced by wind strength on the day) it rarely let us down. When I turned it off for the final time a few weeks ago and felt its soft warmth ebb out of the kitchen it was like saying goodbye to a dear eccentric old companion.
It was the right thing to do, unquestionably. But what remains of its sad, cold bulk is tons of cast iron, worthless on the resale market apparently, either whole or in pieces. Our builder – a man of few but perfectly judged words – is keeping it whole for now, holding out for someone to make an offer, if only to take it away.
It will have to be replaced of course. That means expensive new stuff, probably with built-in obsolescence: an electric oven; a cooking hob; some kind of indoor clothes-drying apparatus to supplement the outside clothes line.
As the project proceeds the scale of it becomes apparent. Sure enough in the lead up, the builder and his mate had looked a bit quizzical as I explained my intention to remain in situ with the dogs and cat. Apart from a desire to stay at home no sanely-priced pet-friendly rentals were available anyway. Within 12 hours l had fled to family members willing to tolerate an invasion for upwards of 10 weeks. And that was after a head-melting month of clearing out the house and storing the contents.
Meanwhile, floors are being dug up to create trenches for new pipes. Cupboards, wiring, sockets and switches must be moved or gutted to accommodate the implausibly thick thermal padding that will line the walls. Old doors and windows are being knocked out for some form of airtight PVC replacements. To meet requirements for a retrofitting grant all windows must be replaced but apart from the unaffordable upfront expense of it, it just seemed wasteful to replace some sound old teak frames that were fitted with double glazing not long ago along with a few others that seem satisfactory to the same reputable joinery company that installed them. So they’re staying.
It seems that to benefit from the retrofitting grants available – ie to raise the entire fabric of the house to a standard that would make sense for a heat pump installation or similar – the whole 75-year-old house would have to be remade. Note that about 70 per cent of the country’s housing stock is at least 40 years old. A lottery win might do it.
Perhaps we should have attempted to do it piecemeal like Jennifer Whitmore, a Wicklow TD. She managed to live in her house while retrofitting it over a two-year period, so clearly it’s possible. She was well pleased with the outcome but she also described the process as “way too expensive”, “a bureaucratic nightmare” and “a pain in the arse” which sounds pretty accurate. If this was the experience of a member of the legislature imagine how it seems to normal people unaccustomed to big expensive projects.
It’s clear from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland’s own figures that many people – even if they manage to pull down the substantial SEAI grants for 50 per cent of the cost – are in no position to take on such work. Writing here a few weeks ago, Noel Larkin, a fellow of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, calculated that only about 5 per cent of the SEAI’s 500,000 Ber of B2 target will be reached by the end of the year. The scheme is not working.
We should never lose sight of the prize, but a process this crucial to achieving essential carbon reduction targets shouldn’t be so damned hard.
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There must be a savage amount of smog around where the Limerick hurling team are training.
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Just finishing up a day’s burning. I’m amazed at the power of a good hot fire. Stuff that might ordinarily smoke and smoulder away for hours can just disappear when the core of the fire is hot enough.
No big plumes of smoke or anything, so good for the environment, and I’ve a hape of carbon created too which the greens are always banging on about.
I feel great now, might have another one next weekend if the weather holds.
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Hopper cannot get a bus from moycullen direction into town that gets him to Eyre Square before 0845. There isn’t one. There is one scheduled but it is pretty always 30 mins late. That is the earliest bus. And you think he should travel how exactly?
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Sure I dunno. Is this relevant to something I said last November?