James Fleming

[James Fleming @Jfleming1977]

@CarlowWeather Liscarroll Co. Cork

[Conor O Leary @conorcoleary]

Poor wastewater management by Uisce Éireann harming environment, EPA finds | Irish Independent https://t.co/EnNoTCSjij

Farmers fail an env inspection if they have a crack in a concrete yard or a missing downpipe, while Uisce Eireann fail if raw sewage makes it to the river

[Mairéad Ó Hagan Anderson. @Killybegsgirl]

When we started our restaurant 7 years ago. Electric was €1500-1800, bi monthly. Went up then to around €2500. Now it’s €4500. We are locked in now with best deal. Seriously look at costs people before you open anything in this wee country of ours.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Whenever a state has wanted a herding people settled and obedient, it has left the people alone and gone for the animals.

1600: Elizabeth's army in Ulster cannot catch the Irish, who live on their cattle and move with them. So it kills the cattle. The famine does the rest.

1870s: the United States cannot hold the Plains nations while there are bison. Thirty million are shot in a decade. By 1889 there are under a thousand. An army colonel says it out loud: every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.

1880s: the survivors are issued flour, sugar and lard on a reservation, and a ration card.

1930: Stalin collectivises the Kazakh herds. Nine in ten animals are gone inside three years. A million and a half Kazakhs die and the rest are put on farms.

1933: Washington decides the Navajo have too many sheep. Agents shoot half of them, in front of the families who own them.

1950: Israel passes the Black Goat Law. The Bedouin's goats are banned from most of the land the Bedouin graze.

1950s: Canadian police shoot the sled dogs of the Inuit, settlement by settlement. No dogs, no hunting. No hunting, no leaving town.

2003: China bans grazing across the Tibetan and Mongolian grasslands and moves the nomads into concrete rows.

2022: Tanzania seizes Maasai cattle by the thousand to clear land for a game reserve.

A people with a herd has its own food, its own wealth and its own legs. There is nothing to cut off.

Take the animals and they will queue for flour, on the day they are told, at the place they are told.

2023: a government paper in Ireland models the removal of 200,000 cows. For the climate.

The reason given changes every century. The first step never has.

[Stephen Morrison @Stephen63224725]

It’s time we started seeing real political accountability in this country. Failures need answers.
No more political careers being protected while families are left carrying the consequences.
#JusticeForHarvey #ResignSimonHarris

[Coolmore @coolmorestud]

Son Of Starspangledbanner Registers Second Win In A Row

Storm Force (3g Starspangledbanner - Southern Belle, by Aqlaam) registered his second successive win with a straightforward score...

https://t.co/q2xJuNJoCD

[At The Races @AtTheRaces]

"The more rain, the better!"

Chatting to @MCYeeehaaa, James Doyle reflects on success for Storm Force before previewing his ride on Kind Of Blue this weekend...

[At The Races @AtTheRaces]

A class above!

Wathnan Racing's Storm Force makes it look easy under a controlled frontrunning ride from James Doyle...

@LingfieldPark @RichardFahey

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The Irish famine was not caused by a potato blight. It was caused by a law passed in 1663, and the blight simply arrived to collect.

Ships left Cork the whole time it was happening, carrying butter and bacon under armed guard, past people dying on the quayside.

The version taught in schools is a fungus. Blight arrives, potatoes rot, tragedy. It leaves out why eight and a half million people were standing on one South American tuber to begin with, and that part is not weather. It has dates and it has signatures.

Ireland had cattle before it had writing. The national epic is a war over a stolen bull. Wealth was counted in cows, rank was counted in cows, and for a thousand years the country ran on beef, milk and butter.

Then in 1663 the English parliament taxed Irish cattle out of the English market, and in 1666 banned them outright, in an act that called the importing of them a common nuisance. Ireland was pushed into salt beef, hides and butter for the navy, the colonies and the slave plantations. Produced on Irish land, sold out of Irish ports, eaten somewhere else. The good ground was reorganised around what would survive a sea voyage.

What was left for the people was the crop that feeds a family off a quarter of an acre of bad land. That is not a folk tradition. That is what you are reduced to when the field behind your house is producing somebody else's dinner.

In 1845 the crop failed and the food kept leaving.

Butter, bacon, ham and live cattle going out of Cork and Limerick and Waterford while the workhouses filled. The relief that existed came with the Gregory Clause: hold more than a quarter acre of land and you were entitled to nothing. Give up the ground or starve on it. Somebody sat down and drafted that.

A million dead. A million gone. Eight and a half million down to six and a half in six years, and Ireland is the only country in Europe with fewer people in it now than in 1840.

The lesson everyone takes is about the fragility of monocultures, which is a comfortable lesson, because it blames a plant.

Nobody starves for want of food in a country that is exporting it. They starve because two centuries of decisions, taken by men who were never going to be hungry, left them one thing to eat and that thing could fail all at once.

Ireland's cattle are now the subject of national emissions targets, and the argument is once again about what that land ought to be producing, conducted by people who will not be eating the outcome either way.

The blight came in 1845. The reason it killed a million people was drafted in 1663.

[China Perspective @China_Fact]

A street cat in Suzhou catches a fish from a pond, No fishing rod, no bait, just pure instinct.

[At The Races @AtTheRaces]

Never in doubt!

Storm Force cruises away from his rivals en route to a simple victory at @Southwell_Races...

[At The Races @AtTheRaces]

"Very pleasing!"

James Doyle reflects on Storm Force's display at @Southwell_Races...

[Nick Delehanty 🇮🇪 @Nick_Delehanty]

All across Ireland there is a growing number of people who realise the State is in their way.

Whether its disability services, housing, immigration, planning, taxes etc.

Each problem comes from the same source of incompetence, needless bureaucracy, woke ideology etc

But we the people are researching.
Asking questions.
Filing FOIs.
Following the money.

But best of all, we are finding one another.

Come find me.
I want to hear you

we are going to do this.🇮🇪

[James Fleming @Jfleming1977]

@shairnn 48

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[gript @griptmedia]

€2.5 million in carbon credits were written off by the State because they became unusable, the Public Accounts Committee has heard, with one TD telling Department officials that the credits "seem like a scam":

https://t.co/8avyhZRHAm

[At The Races @AtTheRaces]

In front where it matters!

The top-weight Secret Santa rattles home late to scupper Hallo Spaceboy in a thrilling finish at @Ascot...

@rhannonracing | @LeveySean

[Carlow Weather @CarlowWeather]

We finally look to have a long settled spell of weather ahead as lows give way to high pressure building near Ireland. After some showers today and Saturday we will see very little rain for 7-10 days. Good sunny spells but temperatures a little cooler.

[Sinéad O’Sullivan @SineadOS1]

The protests in Ireland are not about just fuel! They are about the distance between Ireland on this graph and every other modern and developed economy. Ireland is second wealthiest but gets waaaaay less than any other country for that wealth. By a golden mile.

That visual gap in this graph? That’s what people are protesting. It’s a lack of infrastructure and the everyday enshittification of services, the economy, and the additional difficulty of trying to live, relative to peers in any other country. It also highlights why people don’t get uniformly listened to! - because there is no government architecture to engage meaningfully across this huge gap.

That gap is a three hour drive to work in traffic, a 14 month wait for an MRI, buses that don’t arrive, trains that don’t exist, schools that have no places for your kids, houses that are unaffordable, pubs that close before midnight, €12 sandwiches, expensive fuel.

People feel this gap, even if they can’t explain it precisely. And that builds into resentment, and ultimately protest. Fuel just happened to be the next thing that could be pointed to, today.

[Lynn Lodge Stud @LynnLodgeStud]

💥WINNER💥 @Tattersalls1766 Book 1 graduate Cape Cod wins on his seasonal reappearance at Leopardstown. Congratulations to @coolmorestud and all connections! 👏🏻 #LLS #ResultsWhereItCounts