Eyes On The Sky

Recent news from abroad has confirmed what we have long suspected. We really have caught up with our other European colleagues. I remember, back in the stone age of the 1980s, meeting an Irish woman living in Germany. She commented that the Germans were great travellers. Loved it. Had to see the world. And how did she know? Every time there's a plane crash anywhere, there's Germans killed .

A macabre thought. But true. I remembered it when I heard of the Concorde crash at Gonesse, near Paris. Of the 113 dead, most were indeed Germans, on their way to a luxury cruise in the Caribbean.
But I also noted it when considering the increased number of young Irish people, usually backpackers, who die in Australia, South America, and so on. Hearing of these tragedies reminds us that they are just the tip of an iceberg, a tragic flag marking the enormous numbers of young Irish people traversing the globe.
Of course, nowadays they do it because they want to, not because they need to. In 2000 it's all about seeing and experiencing the world, not of looking for work.
You might say: how very German! But of course, for a generation, it's also been a pattern for Americans. It is less the case for the British, although they're out there too. Or perhaps the difference is to do with where they go ... And, of course, where they went a hundred years ago.
It will be interesting to see how this ramifies back into Irish culture ... whatever that might be in 2010. Because, of course, we're playing host to others, some coming for the reasons we used to travel, others for the reasons we travel now. Washing back and forth across the face of the earth.
There's other groups as well. The cheap air travel revolution has facilitated the globalisation of whole sectors of the population that never dreamed of such dispersal in the past. It isn't always pretty, as a host of appalling fly-on-the-wall teevee programmes are showing. And let's be clear: we can be just as lugubrious as the Brits on tour. Perhaps we're not so different.
But all this comes at a cost, just as Concorde does. Each passenger on a single flight to Britain uses the same amount of fuel energy as a commercial traveller driver does in a year. Planes release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. One flight to France emits the same amount of CO2 as the town of Ennis in a year. They make a major contribution to the greenhouse effect, and to global warming. Concorde is a lot worse.
In addition, as most air travellers can testify, the air traffic control system is under enormous pressure basically, it is at its limits. We can't really get many more planes up there.
Somewhere along the line, we have to impose limits. On moral grounds, we have to ask if the Third World countries indulged in air travel like we do, how could the planet cope? Where would the fuel come from? How would we prevent global warming then? But of course, they are as entitled to travel as we, aren't they? Just as a family from Clonshaugh is as entitled to a sun holiday as a family from Malahide.
Three things suggest themselves. The first is rationing. It has to come. This way, everyone gets a basic entitlement, including children and pensioners. And they can sell them, so a local market develops.
The second is a global commodities market in carbon use. There will have to be limits on the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere. So, if we need to release more, we'll have to buy the ration from elsewhere. Which will be a way of sorting out world debt pretty quickly as well. Certified forestry, of course, enters the equation as well. One tree absorbs all the carbon dioxide that a normal motorist emits in a year.
The third is that we need to start looking at other, terrestrial ways of travelling. We need to take a leaf out of the Danish-Swedish book and build a bridge-tunnel link between Ireland and the UK, one that can take rail as well as road.
This could be good for the environment (as could the Dublin Eastern By-Pass). It certainly was in the Oresund area of the Baltic. The Swedes and Danes rigorously evaluated the impact of their tunnel and found that it actually improved things.
But the point is that trains are an effective and more environmentally sound democratic way of moving large numbers of people over great distances. Of course, that's a strange concept for us here. Fucking trains are the most discredited form of transport of all.
Well, there's the next thing we have to learn from the Germans. How to put a fast and efficient long-distance public transport system in place. After all, if they can get a train from Moscow to Paris on time, literally, surely we can get one to Westport?
The Hog