The Kettle's Boyled: Build it, but build it somewhere else!

I had reason to drive the road between Mullingar and Roscommon Town a few weeks back. Near Ballymahon I passed over Tirliken Bridge on the Royal Canal, a place I know well. I have walked the Royal Canal Way several times, and I have an appreciation of historical importance of the nearby Ballybrannigan Harbour from where passage boats brought thousands of famine refugees to Dublin on the first leg of their emigration in search of a better life abroad.

So you could say I wouldn’t wish anything but the best for this part of the Midlands. I worked too hard to ensure that the canal and its banks survived and were developed to benefit the local and wider community. But crossing the bridge at Tirliken I was surprised to see a large, hand-painted billboard proclaiming ‘No Solar Near Houses Or Canal.’ While this might have simply been saying there was no solar near either, I suspect it was part of a protest against local development of green energy. A further, smaller sign a hundred or so metres away simply said ‘No Solar Here’ something that was patently true if you took it literally, but which also seemed to be part of the same dispute.

Now I know that people normally don’t like change of any kind. They want roads that are safe and driveable, but they don’t want the disruption that goes with widening or improving those roads. They want water to come out of their taps when they turn them on, but dare anyone suggest building a watermain to make that happen. And they want the lights to come on when they flick a switch, but they don’t want that electricity to come from anywhere, they just want it to be there.

Ironically, when the turf-powered generating stations in the midlands (the dirtiest possible kind of power generation) were mooted for closing, there was an outcry. Politicians built careers on clamouring for their reopening, often citing nonsense statistics about how little environmental damage they were doing and even reasoning that because China still burned coal to generate power, it was fine for us to do the same. But it doesn’t work like that.

Solar power is about as clean as it gets, and I suspect many of the protestors know that, but still they object. They don’t picket a householder who puts a few panels on their roof, but if somebody develops solar power on a commercial scale, they object, and it’s hard to understand the logic.

Solar farms are non-polluting and non-intrusive. You can find them all over Europe and you can hardly see them behind the hedges in most cases. They don’t take land from agriculture, and indeed sheep do better under solar panels than in open fields. They help us meet our climate targets and avoid fines, and they leave a better world for our grandchildren. So what’s not to like?