100 Actionable Measures
1) For actions to happen they have to be in line with the law. There is a law outlined called Ecocide and it is accepted in some countries, where companies can be prosecuted for wilfully destroying or polluting areas.
2) Like a firm but friendly bouncer managing a door, give destructive industries instructions and a fixed time to leave.
3) Referendum on climate action and ask what people are prepared to do.
4) Incentivize changes in farming and self employed
5) If farmers go 100% organic, stop using fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, antibiotics and intensive accommodation for animals, they will not only command twice the price for their produce but also will be compensated for crop failures during transition.
6) Educate and excite people about the brown bin. Make it accountable and free.
7) Educate regarding: The word ‘Organic’ means a) Is natural and will biodegrade. Organic also means without trace chemicals from pesticides and fertilizers etc.
7) Pay for useful material:
8) Ban one use plastics – things like pasta and coffee producers will be forced to make biodegradable packaging.
9) Demand that supermarkets analyse their stock and present a commitment to eliminating plastic packaging.
10) Educate the public via programmes/broadcasts and videos on where plastic waste ends up, in forests and oceans and the micro plastics in our bodies and how it doesn’t break down.
11) Support industrious entrepreneurs who can recycle plastics with a low toxicity process.
12) Support entrepreneurs who can de-salinze water and make it drinkable.
13) Accountability: Leave nothing to the experts: Facilitate total transparency as to what is in mains water and water scheme water by requiring reports on animal waste run-off, pesticide and fertilizer run-off, industry spillage, acid rain and other pollutants, to increase the standard and response time.
14) Discuss, nationally, exporting water…rather than gas, oil, wind, water, beef, dairy – whey, casein, veal and pigs. Nobody else in Europe has water. They are laying pipes where river were, to carry water to cities. The surrounding banks and valleys are become barren rather than lash. See the parallel with the piping of water from the Shannon to Dublin.
15) Sponsor inventories of what chemicals are on our fruit and vegetables.
16) Sponsor inventories on what antibiotics are in our meat – so many calves taken too young and sustained on antibiotics as they didn’t even get the colostrum to build their immune systems before being taken from the cows.
17) Ask the people via the referendum if they are comfortable with live export.
18) Cows bred to produce 70 litres a day rather than 10 litres a day suffer during power cuts and droughts as they can get no relief.
19) Eliminate the contradictions: First, if you want biodiversity, you want the national emblem of the hare and not the licenses granted to trap it all year round for autumn coursing. It is protected and yet it is hu
20) Balance the kick-back by subtly offering people who seek to book their coursing tickets, say, a €1 bet on the national lottery or something/anything less barbaric .
21) Fertilizer dries out the ground, leaves its natural fertility bereft with synthetic interventions. Publicize the Californian Gold Belt that that is now nearly a desert with over-worked ground, synthetic fertilizers and gmo crops that have put the local residents in a state of asthmatic fear.
22) Public health, Boots. There is nothing in Boots that has a leaping rabbit on it therefore there is nothing that is not tested on animals. That is not what people in Ireland want any more.
23) Public health, vegetables. Potatoes that are not organic are sprayed up to 30 times with pesticides. That is a lot of residue. You need to assess how much chemical residue there is in and on all supermarket food. There is a legal maximum and everything and everyone has shot past it.
24) Encourage people to grow their own food and share the things that work well for them. Food sovereignty consists of buying food from local sources and at least from Ireland. We have a great opportunity as we still have a clement climate and still enough water.
25) Stipulate that people should save their ‘grey water’, redirecting their guttering down pipes to water butts and reserves. Their gutter water could happily flush toilets and water gardens all through the year.
26) Raise the appreciation for what we have. Not by charging carbon emissions or fuel consumption but by educating: Why do we love trees?! Why do we love worms?!
27) Address the fear. Like when you wrote to me, make a series of statements. Says you welcome efforts and suggestions. State that you support renewable energy and
28) Environmentally led tax breaks.
29) Food security tax breaks
30) Food sovereignty tax breaks
31) Self sufficiency tax breaks.
32) Correct second contradiction: food giants serve exclusively pesticide-ridden products, often with not one organic or ethically produced item in half an acre of shelves and they get tax breaks as food providers.
vs
Organic producers who are required to label and get certification for every practice and stretch of land they use. They want to use un-dyed paper bags but must use copious plastic to identify their sources. They should not be taxed at all but allowed to keep any euro profit they make as it is such hard work. Give incentives like 3 weeks holiday money (like the 180 income support) and co ordinate a bank of farm helpers so organic producers can get away.
33) Shops should provide a well-marked and promoted section: “Local” “Organic”or “Irish” and “Not sprayed” as a provisional way to promote farmer’s transition to organic practice. (They can’t get organic certification until their land is 6 years without chemical use)
34 ) Educate people: A simple booklet on how pesticides incapacitate four of the digestive enzymes and how they are carcinogenic, with one in every two people in Ireland developing cancer.
35) Contradiction three: Explain how sugar accelerates cancers and how the many problems of conventional treatments are made worse by patients being given sweets to cheer them up after chemotherapy.
36) Promote the simple personal changes alongside a national shift to Irish food. Not simply the Green label though. At the moment, there is no qualitative aspect to buying green. Yes it was grown here but the food is grown using the same poisons.
37) Proper food for hospitals, schools and other residential settings. Organic food, no salt (dehydrating for kidney patients), sugar (addictive, feeds cancer cells and weight gain), meat (takes years for the body to break down and from animals raised in dubious welfare conditions, eggs that lead to an overload of protein, milk or extracted dairy proteins.
Organizations and individuals may say that they can’t afford to buy organic ingredients but if they set the same budget as the previous year, caterers can work within in. It is not an argument that not enough chefs know how to produce a balanced healthy diet to avoid food intolerances; I know, for example 10 kilkenny-based chefs well able to feed a hospital, school, hotel or anywhere that needs a great amount of meals delivered.
38) Address geo-engineering. There is plenty of photographic evidence of chem’ trailing over county Kilkenny and other counties. First look up the ingredients of chemicals intentionally sprayed by planes, in a supposed attempt to block sunlight. Look at records of the toxicity to air, soil and local residents too. Find out and stop it.
39) Address rural transport. One simple solution would be to open school buses to the public. As soon as a youth leaves school there is no way for them to get into the village/town/city for work. Many retired people could spend one day a week, doing their bank, post office and shopping etc and be sure of a lift home. Yes, there might need to be a garda-vetted supervisor on the bus because today’s world is what it is but any parent, local worker or teacher would do. These buses are and bigger buses could be going down every road, morning and evening and that’s what’s needed. Ring a link is doing a bit but is not enough.
40) Transport. Electric car grants are only open to corporations and not even to medium sized businesses. Make them affordable.
41) Photo voltaic solar panel grants do not cover costs, providers just added the grant amount. Make them affordable. This could be with simple tax incentive. Eg if a company has provided 300 homes with renewable energy, each within the figure of the individual grant paid then they don’t pay tax on that income. Try and cut through the idea of fleecing everyone at every turn.
42) The whole of Parliament Street is empty. Owners were offered 40,000 euro LOAN to get them up to new fire safety standards. This was work that would cost them at least 75,000 to do. Any rent for the rest of time would be paid by HAP tenants straight to the council, paying back that loan. Therefore the last tenant had to move out 18 months ago and now they are all derelict apart from maybe one lady, home owner above the hairdresser’s, next to what was Hughes auctioneers.
43) Make all actions have a pay off for the people. The council planning department could agree and renovate all the upstairs apartments and fit them with renewable energy source and provide central housing for lots of tenants. Don’t make landlords pay for the work that will cost these older people (most home owners in the city are quite senior now) a whole new mortgage equivalent. You could insist that the rent they charge, after the work is completed, be capped at 450 euro a month, so working couples or even HAP recipients can benefit from the new accommodation created.
44) Iron out inner contradictions within the use of public money. Like the HAP begging landlords to keep tenants while tenants are being threatened with court if they do not evict tenants until work their department considers necessary is done.
45) Offer small incentives for house owners and tenants who maintain a pollinator-friendly garden or produce food. Even something small like 35 euro on July to those who have evidence of looking after their garden/land for air quality and biodiversity.
46) Incentivize community gardens at industrial estates and companies. Sell it as staff well being and productivity increased by managing plants or a section of land or being resourceful or letting off steam digging, all get included in individual or company level recognition.
47) Audit or internal monitoring of business’ environmental impact.
48) Tender for high level innovations like a safe, plastic recycling plant and products. Aim high, it can be administered by Repak but a plant and products and process to which we can direct all existing plastic on land, in circulation and in the Irish Sea: like building blocks or whatever young scientists come up with.
49) Ban the production of plastic. Refuse planning permission for further PET plants (plastic bottling and packaging production). Make Ireland the first to decide that we will create no more and import no more plastic.
50) Start think tanks on every topic. There is a win/win answer to every problem, even climate change. For example, I knew of the problem of public transport as experienced first hand the cancellation of the crucial bus linking Kilkenny City to the IT Carlow. One sentence to the founder of Community Gardens Ireland ‘Can you think of any solution at all to the lack of rural transport when communities don’t know each other any more? She shared, at once, the idea of opening school buses to the public.
51) Introduce cooking and nutrition to schools, based on what we will have. Foods grown in Ireland: Plant based protein sources and non-dairy milks like organic oat milk, easily made here.
52) Publicly counter the prejudice against health foods, vegans and organic growers. They will be the main bank of knowledge to effect social change. re are hopefYou will need them to show how things can be done.
53) Sponsor nut orchards of native hazel, cob and black walnut.
54) Find out what farms and what land has produced what crops. Ask those farmers what they would need to produce without chemicals. Don’t make them compete with products from warmer climates. Total food sovereignty and independence can be prepared for and is then possible.
55) Ask livestock farmers what they would need to convert to arable crops.
56) Invite tenders for the repurposing of machinery and sheds, here or abroad. Renumerate and support a compulsory shift to stop breeding.
57) Phase out intensive farming (some cows producing 70 litres a day rather than 10) (some hens producing 1 egg a day rather than one a month), slaughter houses only semi stunning thousands of animals before killing them for food. It’s a cycle we can stop that would curb the untreated waste from so farmed animals and the chemically grown and gmo feeds they’re now depending on. Many farmers I have worked with are still paying off their fee bills from two winters ago and last winter. It is an industry that is unsupportable and one day, I suspect, will be remembered as unforgivable.
58) Close animal laboratories. 40% of all meat goes into animal feed.
59) Don’t accept the first renewable energy company that suggests something. The upright windmills are considered old technology. They are intolerable to live beside, disrupting the physiology of people, animals and wildlife and the digging of foundations deep enough to hold them. They are also ineffective in comparison to the horizontal dish technology.
60) Stop the gas lighting, where authorities suggest that we should pay for water to appreciate it while allowing Nestle to operate, allow Shell, Dell, Coca Cola etc and increasingly large farming operations to pollute it and allow companies to drill and frack and contaminate all the aquifers and ground water quarry. Engage each consumer but don’t say that climate change is the individual’s fault for not sorting their rubbish. There is a contradiction in permission granted to sonic blast the whole ocean off the west coast to map it for fossil fuels but only allow visits to the Skelligs 3 months of the year to protect it as national heritage. There is a contradiction in allowing Factory trawlers illegally fish thousands of tonnes over their quota and policing the shores to penalize local people who catch more than theirs or who sit by rivers and catch a salmon. In the King Scallop Festival of Valentia, they needed to import Donegal scallops. We need to be consistent and protect our water.
61) Past keeps falling from your view. Work with the people rather than against, like ignoring contamination and extinction concerns over the river at the CAS building.
62) Take out the clause in the tender process of organizations needing to have two equal-sized contracts already. It stops innovation, ethical practice, sustainable and unprecendented ideas being implemented. Only what has gone before can get in. Assign contracts on environmental merit and then support the projects with the necessary funds, financial advisors and administration.
63) Get the fluoride and chlorine out of our drinking water, mains and water schemes. We have the processes.
64) Insist on grey water systems being put in new builds, so that rain water is redirected for flushing toilets and washing up.
65) Insist on chemical and phosphate-free detergents.
66) Teach basic horticulture and herbal medicine for immune support, to relieve dependence on pharmaceuticals.
67) Recognize that pharmaceutical companies are not participating in their communities at all.
68) Look at unleaded petrol, diesel and see if it’s viable
69) Gear further education away from old routes. Currently 500 new Fetac places are taken up in conventional pig farming, despite effluent, slurry, none of the 5 freedoms granted and tail biting and other behaviour and a necessary increase in the use of antibiotics to stem disease, getting less and less effective. This is compared to less than 50 studying Horticulture. It is just considered more profitable and so accreditation is needed to support useful businesses.
