The madness of modern Ireland is easily triangulated with just three names (or rather four); Magnier, Holland and Healy-Rae. Firstly to the splendid TD for Kerry, the much-loved Michael Healy-Rae.
Up until the other day, this fine fellow was a junior minister at the Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for the management of our tree plantations. Wearing his ministerial cap, as well as his own rather bizarre example of the species, he wrote a foreword for a book advocating the mass plantation of Sitka trees. Sitka is a commercially valuable tree with strange habits, which include create vast zones of darkness in which plants and insects cannot survive. Furthermore, Sitka pine-needles acidify the soil, meaning that a plantation of this beast is like a cocktail of Roundup and a lethal insecticide. Still, in about ten thousand years, a rather useful bog might emerge. See you all in about in a hundred centuries from now….
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