Environment

By Ciaran Cuffe It’s Culture Night in Galway. Under a small marquee a few steps away from Eyre Square plans are being discussed for the future of Wood Quay, an historic part of the city that has become over-run by traffic and parking in recent years. Students from the School of Architecture at the University […]

By Jackie Bourke City parks designed in collaboration with residents have become a global phenomenon in the last decade. Re-inventing disused railway lines seems to be a feature and perhaps one of the best known example is the Highline in New York. In this instance a chunk of overhead railway which had become wild and […]

By Ciaran Cuffe Dublin’s Phoenix Park may be the non-pareil of the nation’s parks, but it is time to rethink how it is managed. The big issue is traffic. Over ten million car journeys are made through the park every year. Astonishingly, there are no scheduled bus journeys through it. If you want to travel […]

By Ciaran Cuffe Parks are at the heart of our modern lives. They have crucial role to play as we grow older and as we raise our children. They help reduce stress levels, they boost tourism and yet they only receive crumbs of funding. The following recommendations can transform them. Time for new laws The […]

  Review by Frank Cavanagh Féidhlim Hart’s timely and  practical guide to what he concedes is an “umentionable” activity, one which he notes is ”making the news” gives a very useful overview of the problems associated with sewage treatment and effluent disposal. It is divided into handy foolproof chapters with titles like “How can I […]

By Frank Armstrong I interviewed environmental historian John Robert McNeill, a professor in Georgetown University, best known for his 2000 book, ‘Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-Century World’, shortly after his recent lecture on global environmental history in Dublin. Chicago-based McNeill is also author of ‘Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War […]

By Martin O’ Reilly In October, Dublin City Councillors voted in favour of removing fluoride from public water supplies. The motion, which was passed by 22 votes, called for the removal of fluoride and to make it a crime for anyone that attempts to add it to water supplies. Dublin is not the first city […]