Why are we letting Eamon Ryan away with this madness? And by ‘we’, I mean the idiotic government who would rather leave us sitting shivering in the dark than stand up to the demands of a Swedish schoolgirl.
Instead of taking action to help the Irish people with the frankly horrifying energy bills we’re facing, the Minister for Salads in Window Boxes has announced that he is going to come after the real culprits – people who have boilers in their homes.
This is a government by the petty and the small-minded. First we had the threats made against turf-cutters, who face a clampdown on any attempt to advertise fuel for sale. The powers-that-be had no problem putting together legislation to ban local initiatives to provide badly-needed fuel.
Now, Eamon Ryan has announced a ban on installing or replacing gas and oil boilers to heat both new and existing homes – possibly as soon as 2025.
Bizarrely enough, the policy is being proposed as a response to the energy crisis, when it will simply add to people’s woes. We’re facing galloping inflation, recession, electricity blackouts and more – and Eamon Ryan’s solution is to force us to replace our boilers with costly alternatives.
Its made all the more ridiculous by the fact that neither Ryan nor anyone else can guarantee that alternatives to gas and oil will be available to households by 2025, in any case.
After years of being told that the planet, and us along with it, was doomed, it turns out that it’s not the burning of fossil fuels that is causing potential economic collapse and untold misery, but the lack of oil and gas and peat and other stuff we rely on to keep living and thriving.
Our Cabinet, and the Opposition, like politicians everywhere, are hiding behind the convenient scapegoat of Russia’s entirely predictable reaction to sanctions, and refusing to acknowledge that persistent Green policies, in particular the pretence that we can rely on renewables, aren’t also to blame.
So we can complain about Europe’s dependency on Russian gas and oil until the cows come home, but the fact is that the gas shortage has simply brought attention to the madness of putting the cart before the horse when it comes to energy.
We can’t give up on fossil fuels until we have realistic, reliable alternatives. Only 13% of Ireland’s energy needs are met by renewables at the moment, and wind and solar are notoriously unreliable because the wind doesn’t blow, nor the sun shine, on demand.
Ryan wants to force people to install heat pumps, which can be super, but which are also very costly to install, can be noisy, and only really work efficiently in well-insulated homes.
The government’s answer to any criticism of its plans is to say that they will throw money at the problem, promising millions, nay billions, for retro-fitting and other initiatives, which usually still require significant outlay by the householder and are, of course, adding daily to both our national debt and the difficulty in finding a builder to do anything at all, not to mind solving the housing crisis.
The Federation of Master Builders in the UK say that the drive to replace gas boilers with heat pumps, “will not work because they are too large, noisy and do not produce enough heat”. They argue that the technology required to “make heat pumps quieter, smaller and more efficient” just isn’t available yet, and that a focus on insulation would produce better results at this stage.
But the Irish government seems more interested in listening to Extinction Rebellion than to industry experts. They are rushing to force Irish households to rip out boilers, just as they insisted we close down peat harvesting, and demand we must abandon gas and oil as soon as possible even though we cannot possibly do without those sources right now.
We are reliant on Russian gas in Europe precisely because we have not, despite the billions poured into Green energy, come anywhere near ensuring we can rely on renewable energy. The European Commission tells us that less than 20% of the energy in the bloc is provided by renewables. More than 50% of the energy we need comes from oil and gas.
Other EU countries have responded to the current crisis by resuming drilling for gas and oil. They now realise that we can’t simply abandon fossil fuels if there are no reliable alternatives.
But Eamon Ryan, it seems, knows better. The Minister appeared before an emergency meeting of the Oireachtas Energy and Climate Committee on Wednesday and said there was “no miracle cure” to the soaring bills Irish people face .
“We are in an absolute crisis. People are not going to really see it coming until the bills hit in November, December, January and February,” he said.
Well thanks for that Eamon. Good to know you have a plan. We now realise it includes banning ordinary people from having a boiler in their homes.