I attended the Green Party Convention in Galway over the weekend.

The organisation was superb, and talking to other delegates and candidates, there was a real sense of a party on the move.

I was also very glad to see that the Party had no interest in getting into the tax rate auction that has kicked off between Labour and the Progressive Democrats. I don’t think Irish people are interested in tax cuts for the sake of tax cuts. What they want is for someone to use their taxes in a way that improves the quality of their lives. Its a question of responsibility, not generosity.

Otherwise, Trevor Sargent focused on 3 key messages:

Real action on climate change and the promotion of the renewable economy; a New Deal for children, including a reduction in class sizes and medical cards for all children under 6; and an end to corporate funding of political parties.

Over the coming months, I hope to exlain to voters why it is so important that these policies are implemented. As Trevor said in his speech, its about Action, not Auctions.

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Roscommon County Council seems to be totally at sea when it comes to planning law.

Picking up the legal bill for the dispute over Michael McDowell’s holiday home was bad enough, but now the Council’s bungling has resulted in the loss of 20 jobs at Boyle Quarries.

Quarries are never an easy issue to deal with. On the one hand, they are vital to economic development, but on the other, they have a huge impact on the lives of people living on their peripheries.

That’s why we have planning law, to allow opposing interests exist under an agreed set of rules.

Roscommon County Council should never have let this case go to Court. Section 261 of the Planning and Development Act 2000 provides a range of mechanisms under which quarries which do not have planning permission can continue to operate.

Instead, the Council allowed the quarry owners to continue operating in a manner that was having a huge impact on the lives of people living close by, with the inevitable result that those people would bypass the Council and seek remedy in the Courts.

Now, instead of resolution with which both sides can live, we have a closed quarry and a community at odds with itself.

Quarries are a feature of rural Ireland, and people accept that. But quarries are not above the law, and people should not be forced to sacrifice their quality of life because their Local Authority is incapable of enforcing the law.

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“A billion here, a billion there, and soon you’re talking serious money”.

I heard John Ellis on the radio yesterday trying to defend the Government’s decision to spend over €600m of taxpayers money on toll booth on the M50. I had heard rumblings that the Government were going to do this in the run up to the General Election, but I didn’t think they’d actually go through with it.

The net benefit of this to the motorist is that instead of having to wait for a barrier to lift after they pay their toll, the barrier will be removed, probably sometime in 2008. The tolls will remain, as will the traffic jams, and NTR will walk off with a truckload of our money.

Compare this to what the Government has spent on rural transport in the last 5 years: €13m, and what the Government has spent on the Intercity Rail network in the last 5 years: €263m.

Yes, in one fell swoop, the Government is going to spend 46 times as much on a single toll booth as they have spent on public transport in rural Ireland in the last 5 years!

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