Sir, – I acknowledge with appreciation Stephen Wall (Letters, October 7th) endorsing my points (Letters, October 6th) on the safety and societal impacts of the decades of delay on the M20 between our second and third largest cities.
I am disappointed he misunderstood my point on the most recent delays as being ideological and his suggestion this applied to climate issues generally. I totally accept the urgency of climate control and decarbonising measures. I would go further and faster than our current Government planning. I accept that electric vehicles are not a panacea, but they, along with possibly hydrogen vehicles, are important elements of the bigger solution and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels. They and public transport busses need good roads to operate on.
Ireland has the geographic capacity to be virtually self-reliant on green electricity by a mix of solar, wind, tidal, biomass and other emerging technologies. I am reminded of the farsightedness of Turlough Hill which I visited on a school tour in the 1970s and even back to the vision of the early State and its funding of Ardnacrusha which cost 20 per cent of GDP at the time and made us one of the greenest countries in Europe for a period.
What we need now is similar vision and commitment to strategic and sustainable energy and infrastructure projects, not tinkering on the edges. Mr Wall’s last comment that investing in road infrastructure that avoids linking two major cities by winding through towns and villages is “completely incompatible” with that vision is “ideological” and wrong. We need this along with the other components. I thank him for using one UN report forward to illustrate his point. I don’t need him to remind me that there are thousands of other peer-reviewed studies on the urgency of dealing with the issue that space here precludes mentioning. The decarbonising case is irrefutable and I would join with him in highlighting all of the issues, not just some. – Yours, etc,
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ANDREW DOYLE,
Bandon,
Co Cork.