Sustaining Cork - Part 2

30th Aug 2010

The thought of any under-30 member of your household or flat growing any plants at home might spark thoughts of flashing blue lights, a 10 year mandatory prison sentence and an appearance by RTE's Pascal Sheehy in his famous woolly coat outside your home but many Corkonians are now "growing their own" without the fear of the Emergency Response Unit hammering down their backdoors.

With sustainability now all the rage Corkonians are taking to the soil like Kerry's Aidan O'Mahony in a Munster final. And while the benefits of O'Mahony's infamous fake dive to get Donnacha O'Connor sent off were bad for Cork, this interest in spending more time on the turf is reaping rewards for Leesiders left, right and centre.

Dunnes Stores, in their attempt to out-Paddy rival supermarket giant Tesco have littered their advertisements with the slogan "different because we're Irish" (the irony being only the UK giant acknowledges the Irish language in its store but that's an argument for another day).

But how proud are we Corkonians to be Irish these days anyway? Well with the heading at the top of this page we don't need to declare our opinion on that but now you can go one better than the supermarkets. When you plonk your own veggies on the dinner table you can assure all around you that yours are "different because we're Corkonian".

Keeps their minds of football and hurling for a while and ups their interest in eating veggies instead of wham bars.

Smallies
Most kids seem to be born with a gene that prioritises jelly snakes, bubble gum and gob stoppers over healthy options like tomatoes, apples and carrots. With out doubt it is one of evolutions more intriguing side-effects and parents are left struggling to make up for nature's devilish desire for 'sugar coated anything' with various ingenious tricks to get the infamous five-a-day into the esophagi of their young.

The handy thing about growing your own is that the young food terrorists themselves can get involved and be encouraged to look after their own miniature food factory.

With a little bit of good old fashioned plamás about how fantastic their tomato plants are (despite being accidentally fed milk or unintentionally bashed with a hurley) it is highly unlikely that they'll resist indulging in the pretty looking bounties that hang from their precious plants like bells on a Christmas tree.

For young uncles and aunts this is also a cheap and cheerful way to spend quality time with one's young nieces and nephews. And because you or someone known to you nurtured every piece of homegrown fruit and veg from seed to supper plate you'll be far less likely to toss excess food in the bin too (see last week's rant about unsustainable landfills ).

This is the type of Cork that will survive and thrive long into the future - its dependence on outside forces greatly diminished.

We've always been concerned about non-Corkonian influence in our affairs. Corkonians needs to make sure we all start coming around to the reality that with a soaring world population one of the biggest concerns for future generations is going to be food.

Like oil we import much of it and are then powerless in the face of any price rises. Buying locally produced food (Supervalu and Tesco label a lot of Cork made products) or banging out your own in the back garden reduces Cork's exposure to unpredictable food prices.

Coomagearlahy on the Cork/Kerry border. Click here for a short video panorama

Where There's a Wind There's a Way
If you find yourself on Cork border patrol at any stage doing your duty to ensure all Kerry animals are kept west of Ballyvourney you'll spot the elegant looking white wind turbines at Coomagearlahy.

Twirling away quietly but relentlessly these fellas are pumping over 40 MW of power onto the national grid to drive cookers, heaters, freezers, Playstations and so on in over 20,000 homes. Not bad for a bit of bleak awkward scrub land in the arse end of nowhere.

So why don't we bang 'em up all over the shop, a set off turbines on every hilltop, cliffside and Godforsaken outpost in the county?

If we were entirely wind energy dependent, aside from random power cuts due to the unpredictability of the wind itself (which would drive you round the bend if you had just made savage progress in Grand Theft Auto Vice City or were covered in soap in an electric shower on a cold January morning) one of the biggest problems facing wind engineers is connecting all this deliciously cheap energy to the national grid.

The stark reality is that unless we start lashing up pylons at the rate we threw up houses during the boom we'll be banging our heads against a wall (or an idle roadside sub-station) for quite a while - not to mention burning fossil fuels to keep the power lights shining on giant flat screen TVs, electric showers and internet modems thus keeping the nation's carbon footprint dangerously high.

The Dublin government have been criticised for not pushing the turbo boost button to get this critical aspect of Ireland's infrastructure rolled out but that's where the brakes of local democracy tend to kick in.

The second more pylons are mooted for any area a queue of angry protestors with placards forms outside the constituency offices of the TDs in which they are planned. So things are not as straight forward as they seem which is which why we have to be patient with progress.

Click here to visit SERG's website

Cork to the Rescue
There's good news though. The nation can sigh in partial relief that Cork is home to the elite Sustainable Energy Research Group (SERG). You'll find them in that quare looking wooden place opposite the Lee Fields. Within this building's (no-doubt highly insulated) walls are where the cream of Europe's engineers are hatching the island's long term energy strategy through their painstaking research.

Quietly and efficiently these men and women, considered among Europe's elite engineering academics, pour over streams of data outputted from super computers and insanely complex mathematical models that take days at a time to run (control, alt and delete must be so tempting every now and then!). They publish what seem like obscure reports which are in fact crucial decisions in making sure the island's lights or Playstations don't go out.

Politicians and we, the Cork public, need to tune ourselves in to what scientists like these are saying so that we can all buy-in to both global and local game plans. There's no room for fake dives, political showboating or mé féin-ing glory runs here.

(Read part one of this article here)