Columnist

This month’s theme has been coming up everywhere I go. Permaculture’s seventh principal asks designers to steer away from monocultures – be it plants or demographics. In a garden or forest we know that by planting mixed species to create biodiversity we can naturally avoid many problems with pest and […]

Fiona Hayes delves deeper into the government’s policy to ‘promote’ mineral exploration and finds that currently 28 per cent of the land in Ireland is under licence for mineral prospecting. In fact most of the land here in West Cork is either ‘open for licence’, ‘open with exploration incentives’ or […]

This month we look at the seventh principal of permaculture, and the first that takes a ‘top-down’ approach, looking at the big patterns and detail that should be used to guide the detail of design. In classic permaculture design it is the pattern of nature that should dictate the design. […]

Reading the Programme for Government that our new Administration agreed you may be enthused, or may be disappointed by the environmental aspects to be found therein.  There exists a perceived lack of trust between the people and governments, where environmental matters are concerned, despite the rights we have concerning decisions […]

This month we look at our sixth Permaculture design principal ‘Produce No Waste’ and how it might offer some new ideas into the Cool Clon, and perhaps some reflections on how we might have lived this principal naturally during Covid-19 restrictions. Apart from composting food scraps and minimising packaging (think Twig!) […]

As we catch our breaths after the politically eventful past few days, weeks and months; my colleagues in the Dáil settle into their new roles as part of a coalition Government. Of course, in these busy and challenging times, there is little space for contemplation, but I think it’s important […]