The State is “falling down” on its own climate change targets, Senator Michael McDowell has claimed. 

In the 2021 Climate Action Plan, the Government set a target of halving carbon emissions and rolling out one million electric vehicles on Irish roads by the end of the decade. 

Three-years on, Senator McDowell is sceptical Ireland has the grid capacity to cope with such a large number of electric cars.

“I’ve a holiday place on the Shannon and in the last two months I think, I’ve had five notices from ESB saying that the power was going to be cut,” he told The Hard Shoulder. 

“You get a week’s notice in advance… and it’s okay for me, I can say, ‘Well, I’m not going down to that house this weekend or whatever’ and change my plans. 

“But if you’re working from home, bringing up a family, if you’re told you’re going to have an outage from nine in the morning till half five in the afternoon, these are massive interferences with people’s lives.” 

Senator McDowell said many of the Government’s policies were “aspirational” but not yet “implementational”.

“Is Ireland really preparing for an all-electric existence?” he said. 

“Have we put in place the infrastructure, the planning to bring this all about?

“The answers at the moment seem to be no… We are falling down on all of the targets that we’ve set ourselves.” 

Forestry

If Ireland is to hit net zero by 2050, the level of forest cover needs to be increased from 11% to 18%. 

It is yet another target Senator McDowell believes is unrealistic. 

“We’re supposed to be planting 8,000 hectares of forestry every year,” he said. 

“We’re still between 1,500 and 2,000. 

“So, we’re roughly a quarter of the necessary plantation rate to meet that target which is part of the carbon neutral strategy.” 

Island Wood near Newmarket, Co Cork, Ireland. Image: Flickr

Senator McDowell also hit out at the “very slow” rate at which wind farm applications are approved. 

“We put in place a system of licensing for those offshore installations through a semi-State [body] called Mara,” he said. 

“Then we said that when they issue their licences and conduct their auctions, the applicants then have to go to An Bord Pleanála. 

“They’ve have to recruit a whole load of people because they’ve no expertise in offshore developments. 

“So, you couldn’t devise more of an obstacle course towards meeting our offshore targets.” 

In the first three months of 2024, Ireland’s carbon emissions dropped by 2%.

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Main image: An offshore wind farm. Picture by: Alamy.com