This year saw some positive moves on the environment, but also a number of worrying developments, writes Michael Viney.
In a winter like this one, the environment is what sends you home sodden, windswept, and worried about the roof. Meteorologists can play it cool, so to speak, and insist we've had it all before, but given the size of the raindrops this is climate change just like it said on the tin.
The jury's still out scientifically on whether we lose the Gulf Stream next decade or next century; the year has brought the usual disagreement. From the UK's National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton came more evidence of weakening in the deep-ocean current that drags warm water up from the tropics (it shut down altogether for 10 days in November 2004). Never mind, say scientists in Belgium and Germany, their climate models show the worst won't happen - and some of them are at Louvain, a Catholic university.
Meanwhile, as the contribution of air travel and air freight to global atmospheric pollution spells out one kind of message, Ryanair bids blithely for Aer Lingus and Dublin Airport announces a doubling in size. To square Ireland's CO2 output under the Kyoto Agreement, the Government commits €290 million to buying carbon allowances, thus, theoretically, keeping the air cleaner in poorer countries. Even Friends of the Irish Environment were offering Carbon Credits as a Christmas gift, so that more Jamaicans will switch to long-life light bulbs.
The Budget announcement came just ahead of today's deadline from the EU Commission, demanding better Irish performance in actually cutting back on CO2 emissions. But Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government Dick Roche told last month's climate change conference in Nairobi that Ireland had "managed to decouple" emissions from economic growth, a claim reminiscent of White House philosophy and one that may now need revision in the light of new figures from Sustainable Energy Ireland which show a close relationship between growth and carbon emissions.
At the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis, Roche had assailed his critics: "The Green Party jihadists of the environmental movement seem hellbent to make Ireland a martyr to their peculiar vision of environmental purity. Their published policies on climate change would bankrupt Ireland and set back the economic gains of the past 20 years."
Now the Budget left him positively glowing: "We have never seen [ one] with such a focused approach to the environment." The package did, indeed, touch a lot of bases across a range of government policies: more money for green energy technology in homes and businesses, for farming trees, and growing and harvesting energy crops. Cleaner cars get a cut in tax; SUVs will pay more (but after the election).
Environmentally, the Minister could claim quite a successful year: plenty of new sewerage schemes and good progress on the EU Water Framework Directive. At the same time as promising even cleaner rivers, he got the farmers off his back by juggling an EU derogation on the levels of nitrate they spread on the land. A new National Strategy on Biodegradable Waste revealed, in passing, that one in 10 households now goes in for composting, thus easing up on landfill and renewing the island's soil.
The conservation NGOs have given the minister remarkably little trouble, though the Irish Peatland Conservation Council continues to nag about threatened bogs that were meant to be protected.
THE ROW OVER snaking the M3 through the Tara Valley continued through the year, with stoical protest marches continuing as late as November. After the High Court found in the Minister's favour, Roche approved archaeological excavations along the road's route, saying the aim would be "to protect the rural character, setting and archaeological heritage of the landscape" in the vicinity of Tara and the new motorway.
But news of a proposed recycling centre beside a big interchange within sight of Tara has tied in with fears that the junctions and bypasses of Ireland's new roads are attracting an eruption of speculative development. The chairman of An Bord Pleanála, John O'Connor, warned in October that planning permissions for hotels, business parks and retail warehousing alongside new motorways could mean that the massive investment in the roads could be written off within 10 years.
His concern echoed that of the National Roads Authority, and brought support from the Heritage Council - part of its pressure for putting a landscape management programme into the new National Development Plan. In 2004, Ireland signed the European Landscape Convention, and the Heritage Council chief executive, Michael Starrett, has been increasingly outspoken in urging government action. "We don't just look at our landscape, we all live in it," he said in October, "and we need now to get serious about managing it. Why we don't have such legislation already is hard to comprehend."
Meanwhile, his agency is working on a pilot project with Meath County Council to provide landscape conservation areas in the Tara/Skryne valley.
After another year of arm-wrestling between the the Minister for Rural Affairs, Éamon Ó Cuív, and the IFA, the future of walkers' access to the hills is looking brighter for the coming year.
Determined not to pay farmers directly for access to land, Ó Cuív was proposing payments for the creation and upkeep of local "walkways", linear or looped. Connacht hill farmers had crowded into a Westport, Co Mayo meeting in October to back the IFA demand for a national, flat payment of €1,000 a year, topped up with €5 per metre of path, but negotiations at the start of this month were taking the "walkways" route to compromise.
Salmon fishermen, however, remain militant in their fight against the new drift net ban, meant to relieve the pressure on fish returning to Ireland's rivers to spawn. They challenge the data and options considered by the Independent Salmon Review Group and the lack of a negotiated settlement.
THE STATE OF our rivers might seem to matter very much to otters, but a new survey for the National Parks and Wildlife Service suggested otherwise. Yes, there's an ongoing decline, but water pollution - at least of the rural Irish kind - doesn't seem to explain it; the otters were, if anything, happiest with "slight" pollution, but their biggest decline has still been in the highly developed east of the island rather than the cleaner south-west.
Pollution has certainly made a difference in western trout and salmon rivers that also hold the last colonies of freshwater pearl mussel - their presence a guarantee of pristine water.
Evidence that the run-off of phosphate fertiliser from clearfelled Coillte plantations was smothering river beds with algae and suffocating young mussels brought a ministerial moratorium on clearfelling along the banks of the best mussel rivers.
Seabeds are suffering, too, especially from bottom trawling with heavy rollers and chains.
Video evidence of the damage to the newly mapped and ecologically vital deep-water coral reefs prompted Dick Roche to declare four big areas of seabed far off the west coast as Special Areas of Conservation under the EU Habitats Directive. It remains unclear how they are to be policed.
The year also saw him prohibit glue traps for catching songbirds, a similar provision to that of the Protection of Wild Birds Act, 1930. In Dáil debate on that earlier occasion, the young Deputy for Dublin South, Sean Lemass, spoke of the misery it would cause to the 300 people who made a precarious living in the bird-catching trade.
"If the economic situation becomes better," he said, "we can then afford to indulge in luxury legislation of this kind, but we must put the necessities of human beings before those of wild birds."
The good times are here at last.