Our house was suddenly shrouded in a thick, grey mass of cloud and it felt like a sea fog had descended.
The Irish could not give a damn for rules and regs and no one is going to tell them what they can set fire to
To some extent it had, but the fog grew in density until it wasn’t feasible that this was coming off the sea. The builder boyfriend came in from the stable yard and reported an acrid smell in the rain.
This is what happens when fog descends. People burn their most difficult and illegal waste when visibility is low.
‘It’s the plasticky dew,’ said the builder b, who likes an Irish republican song. Nowadays you are more likely to experience the plasticky dew than the Foggy Dew, because the Irish, while worshipping the EU for paying them farming subsidies, also completely ignore EU law and set fire to all their rubbish. Or to paraphrase that song about the Easter Rising:
The world did gaze with deep amaze
At those fearless men but few
Who bore the fight in fading light
To burn their plastic new.
You’ve got to hand it to the Irish. They could not give a damn for rules and regs and no one is going to tell them what they can set fire to. Every house around us has a chimney belching smoke into the sky, seven nights a week, from fireplaces illegally burning coal, wood, turf and the contents of every kitchen bin.
And in their fields and back yards, the brave men and women of the rebel county light huge bonfires of disobedience to obliterate the larger items they refuse to dispose of using the methods demanded of them by their EU masters, such as skips costing €600 a time and expensive private recycling lorries, for there are no council collections here in the boondocks of West Cork.
Every now and then, someone on this hillside sets fire to a particularly gigantic pile of refuse, and if you go outside and take a breath of air it makes you feel like you’re going to get high or indeed keel over from toxic poisoning.
This is the funny thing about the inhabitants of countries that are enthusiastically in the EU. They are very sensibly determined to strip every last euro out of the deal while disobeying every last edict from Brussels.
This, of course, was the reverse of the attitude Britain had and why our membership did not work out. The Brits obeyed every rule and regulation while being a net contributor, getting nothing for our trouble.
The Irish, like the French, get nice new tractors and plenty of dosh for growing random forests and putting solar panels on the roofs of barns made into holiday lets using grants for providing tourism accommodation. And, if you are running a local authority, you can declare your town ‘autism friendly’ for a payout that rewards the putting up of posters in shop windows intimating that the staff promise to be nice to children who shout a lot.
As for the rules, well, as an acquaintance in her seventies, says when I ask whether she worries about the ban on burning waste: ‘Nat at all! We don’t listen to that. We don’t agree with it.’
Bearing in mind that 70 per cent of this ageing population live, as she does, in remote places with little or no central heating, burning fuel in hearths to stay warm, and bearing in mind that everyone here is proud of their heritage, what do you think the Irish think of the EU attempting to ban turf, for example? This is meant to safeguard the peat bogs of Ireland as a carbon neutral offset for the EU as a whole. But, while banning the sale of Irish turf, the EU allows turf to be dug up in other countries and exported to Ireland for sale.
Believe it or not, Ireland imported 20,000 tons of peat in 2023 alone, and since 2016 it has imported 172,000 tons. Ireland contains more peat than any country in Europe except Finland. But it has to import peat under EU law.
So if the BB and I want turf, we can buy and burn some expensive German turf. But if we wanted to buy reasonably priced local turf, what would happen, I’m told, is that a man would turn up at our back gate and empty some sacks off his truck, take the money from us and tell us that if we ever told anyone this had happened he would deny it.
Alternatively, we could burn our own turf if we happened to have a peat bog on our land and if we dug it up for ourselves, not for sale. So far as I can tell, we don’t own a peat bog, although it is getting very boggy down the bottom field.
Blow-ins like us keep to these laws because we don’t have the network and the confidence in how much the locals trust us to get involved in a turf speakeasy.
Given the relatively low immigration rate, I’m guessing that makes no difference to net zero.
As for the rural Irish, they think net zero refers to how much they give a damn for EU law.
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