South West College granted £23k to tackle marine litter in Lough Erne And Strule River

SOUTH West College in Fermanagh and Tyrone has been awarded £23,000 as part of Live Here Love Here’s Marine Litter Capital Grants Scheme, where organisations, community groups and businesses across Northern Ireland can benefit from funding to help protect local waterways and marine areas.

The scheme made £198,000 available to purchase equipment and machinery that will aim to prevent litter entering the marine environment as well as remove litter from coastal and riverine areas. The grant money allocated will help preserve aquatic spaces, improve marine biodiversity and the health and wellbeing of coastal communities.

Supriya Foster, Sustainability Officer at South West College, said: “We plan to use the money to raise awareness of and combat plastic pollution in line with our commitment to the UN Sustainability Goals. This will be actioned by series of workshops, an awareness campaign and recycling centres introduced across all 5 campuses.

"We will also be adding over 80 new outdoor recycle points across our campuses. South West College is in a unique position to make a discernible difference in the fight against plastic pollution, being adjacent to both Lough Erne and Strule River.

IRISH wind farms providing 42 per cent of the Ireland’s electricity, slightly more than in January but down on the record-breaking performance in February 2022, according to Wind Energy Ireland. Driven by wind’s strong performance average prices on the wholesale electricity market fell to their lowest point since November 2022.

Noel Cunniffe, CEO of Wind Energy Ireland, said: “Irish wind farms provided nearly half the country’s electricity in the first two months of the year. Every unit of power they produce pushes fossil fuels off the electricity system, helping to cut our carbon emissions and to insulate families and businesses from the worst effects of the energy price crisis.

“We expect to see significant progress this year with new wind farms connecting to the grid, solar projects coming on stream and the first offshore wind projects applying for planning permission.

“But it is Ireland’s planning system that remains the main barrier to the rapid development of renewable energy in this country. Projects are queued up in An Bord Pleanála with very few signs of progress or improvement. We cannot build renewable energy and reinforce our electricity grid with a planning system that is fundamentally broken.

“The reforms the Government is bringing forward to the planning system can certainly help but the key issue of under-resourcing is going to remain. There simply are not enough people with the right skills in agencies like An Bord Pleanála and the National Parks & Wildlife Service.”

By Eddie O’Connor, Kevin O’Sullivan

AS we live through the throes of an energy crisis this timely book sets out how electricity can finally get the world off fossil fuels, and accelerate moves to a zero-carbon world. The essential element in this transformation is setting up a supergrid to transmit vast amounts of power quickly to where it’s most needed.

Supergrid – Super Solution sets out how this can be done in the European context, with Ireland playing a lead role through deployment of its vast offshore wind resources. This is in a new energy supply system delivering consistently cheaper power, all made possible by using ‘superconductor’ technology. The plan involves the creation of an energy revolution using superconductor cables to deliver electricity from offshore wind and solar to areas of peak demand at the heart of Europe through rollout of the supergrid - by deploying already proven technology. Orpen Press • Around €20

By Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs

FLANN O’Brien: Acting out is the first fulllength study to comprehensively address the themes of performance, masking and illusion in the author’s fiction, columns, correspondence and scripts.

These essays reveal, for the first time, the fullness of O’Brien’s literary engagements with diverse theatrical movements (melodrama, revivalism, tableaux vivant, Grand Guignol, modernist anti-theatre) and playwrights (Shakespeare, Goethe, Boucicault, Synge, Yeats).

The book draws attention to the author’s critically neglected writing for stage and screen. These scripts are here reevaluated against their historical contexts and through their thematics of war, nationalism, gender, nonhuman bodies and posthuman identity. UCD Press • Around €30

By Turlough O'Riordan, Terry Clavin

THE Irish Revolution inflicted unprecedented damage to built-up and natural landscapes between 1916 and 1923. Destruction transcended national and ideological divisions and remained a fixture within Irish urban and rural landscapes years after independence, presenting an Ireland politically transformed yet physically disfigured.

Enduring Ruin: Environmental Destruction during the Irish Revolution examines how and to what degree revolutionary activity degraded, damaged and destroyed Ireland's landscapes. This book represents the first environmental history of the revolutionary period and in doing so incorporates the roles animals, earth, water, trees, weather, and man-made infrastructure played in directing and absorbing revolutionary violence. This book re-evaluates interpretations and pioneers a new phase in the study of the Irish Revolution

UCD Press • Around €3 0