Wilf Rock

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; 
Thus unlamented let me die; 
Steal from the world, and not a stone 
Tell where I lie.

When I was in Grad School in the early 1980s, I was trying to get a novel handle on the [Euro]peopling of New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. I did A Lot of reading about pre-colonial demographics. I also put in a lot of field-work foot-miles from Cape Breton to Cape Cod in the East to New York and up the Hudson River valley to Montreal and the St Lawrence. Starting in to Year Three of this project my boss advised me to enroll in an evening course at the Harvard Extension School. It was something like "Grave markers and iconography in colonial New England cemeteries". As reg'lar readers may suspect, I have a low threshold for "gosh how interesting, do tell me more". I can't remember any details but if you plot "flying skulls" across time and space it looks like this fashion for memorializing the beloved dead in this way swept like a wave across  New England . . . only to be replaced by "sad angels", Our teacher projected A Lot of 50x50mm slides from a very large collection.

My abiding memory is of gravestones remembering several children from one family dying within days of each other. Also considerable discrepancy in age between husband and wife. And so many dead young mothers. Death omnipresent, a belief in a happy hereafter, but people still wanted [their names and dates] to be recorded forever in this vale of tears.

My Grandfather Wilfred [L, R] was born in in 1879 at The Big House in King's County as the youngest son. There was no future there, let alone a fortune, so he upstakes and joined the Army seeing service in the Second [Colenso, Spion Kop, Mafeking, Ladysmith, that one] Boer War and on the NW Frontier.  One story is that he got rather too deeply in a romantic entanglement in India, so resigned his commission and fled to America in the 00s of the 20thC: maybe winning a section of the Hollywood Hills in a card game; maybe being in San Francisco during or just after the 1906 earthquake; maybe losing all his money to become a panhandling hobo for a while. With more certainty, he volunteered for the RNVR in WWI and lost a lung while serving a balloon-observer in the North Sea. Later he was stationed in Egypt with the RNAS (Air Service) which, in 1918, was merged with the RFC to form the RAF Royal Air Force. I'm sure there were other people who served in all three divisions of the armed forces, but he's the only one who is related to Me. When peace broke out, he became Harbourmaster at Dunmore East, which is where his only son, my father grew up. The photo was apparently snapped in 1952, when Wilfred was about the age I am now. He's got a better hat, but I've got a better sofa!

Wilfred [was] retired in 1947 and lived out his remaining days across the water in Co Wexford. He died in 1957 and was buried [R] in St Mary's, the Church of Ireland First Fruits church where his cousin (and landlady) played the organ. I always found it peculiar that there should be a (Carlow white granite) cross at the grave-head because in practice he was agnostic edging atheist. But then again, your still living rellies have the final say w.r.t. grave-goods.

The Board of First Fruits was a cunning plan which, between 1778 and 1833 funnelled a lot of money into building "established" churches (and glebes to house the rectors) across the island of Ireland. 700 new and refurbished churches over 50 years had a significant impact on the landscape of vernacular architecture. At some level of consciousness we'll have twigged "Oh, another Protestant church on that hill, down than lane" there is no need to read the sign-board, if any, to recognise the Gestalt. St Mary's has the same look-and-feel as the church in Bunmahon which is now the Copper Coast Visitor's Centre. 

Wilfred lay there among the Protestants, quietly weathering topside and composting below. Thirty-something years later, we came back to Ireland in 1990 and I would drop in to say hello if I was passing. I reported to my father that the lettering at the foot of the cross was weathered almost to illegibility. In 1998, we asked the local monumental mason to "make it better". This stone-guy emptied a £15 bag of chippings onto the concrete slab and sent an invoice for £120. Which was a bit disheartening. Shortly after that my father died in his turn and grave-keeping slipped way way down on the list of priorities. That chippings episode turned out to be useful because my letter to the mason recorded the full text of the inscription while it was still, barely, legible.

Forward another ~25 years and there were more deaths in the family. Three of them were buried in Kill, Co Waterford and a rather spectacular, somewhat foreign looking, ✞ was commissioned to mark the spot. This was all the work of Thomas Glendon, a quite-famous mason and letterer, and last year I drove a shovel to facilitate some up date-ing. We all liked the cut of Tom's lettering: very elegant, the ligatures. Tom is even older than me, and with a sense of clock ticking, we asked Tom to re-cut Wilfred's 1957 inscription.  I lied about the inscription in 2o2o. It's not Stephenson's Home is the sailor, home from the sea And the hunter, home from the hill but rather Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas [as L and below] from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene which has the virtue of being a) shorter than RLS b) penned, possibly in Ireland, by a planter from the Other Island. Our planter family came over about 50 years later . . . and stayed.

As they do, and like Topsy, the project growed. From two lines scrunched at the base of a granite cross to 200kg of recumbent Kilkenny black limestone slightly battered to shed the rain, and filling about 20% of the space between the curbs of the grave. That took forever several months of to-fro, but on a bitter wet and wind-driven day at the end of January, Wilf's Rock was delivered to site [R] as we watched white horses scudding across Bannow Bay.

Book 1. CANTO IV, verse XL
He there does now enjoy eternall reft
And happy eafe, which thou doeft want and craue,
And further from it daily wandereft:
What if fome little payne the paffage haue
That makes fraile flefh to feare the bitter waue?
Is not fhort paine well borne, that bringes long eafe,
And layes the foule to fleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after ftormie feas,
Eafe after warre, death after life does greatly pleafe.

Title a rather weak reference to Wolf Rock which caused HMS NormalAccident in 2002. The more familiar, because nearer, Wolf Rock has a lighthouse. Waterwolf is another, floodier, thing altogether. 

More Math Book

I had a troika of math-for-normals books on the go in parallel at the end of May.  One The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (2013) by Simon Singh was admittedly more for noodles than for normals. Maths On The Back of an Envelope (2019) by Rob Eastaway is in the tradition of John Allen Paulos [whom bloboprevs] and his A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995). Numeracy is important to prevent yourself or your granny being gulled by nonsense which appears in modern media. Eastaway could, with Simon Singh, Simon Clark, Hannah Fry, Tim Harford, James Grime, Adam Rutherford, Matt Parker, Marcus du Sautoy, Alex Bellos [yes all of blobochecked] make up a cricket team of Explainers of Maths resident in the UK: who therefore know the difference among googol, google and googly.

I twigged that Eastaway was more than {one book picked of a library shelf in rural Ireland} when he wrote about being called up for a crap-detecting soundbyte by local radio. And also about canvassing an audience of teenagers for the weight in stones (rather than kilos which have been curriculum official in UK for the last 50 years). No surprises that he has worked with the UK Math Trust where Gdau.I is currently wrestling kangaroos. Ten years ago he won-a-gong from the IMA [Institute of Mathematics and its Applications] and he's written a dozen books

One of the themes in Envelope is getting numbers correct but not too correct. When RTE reports that 48.34% of people support the bacon-and-cabbage for dinner movement, the number is a blur while "half" or "50%" can be taken in. If  the number is absorbed it may trigger a question like "I wonder what the proportion was in 1996?". It was a time of transition, in 1997 my farming neighbour confessed that his family had frozen pizza for dinner the day before: induced to do so by his teenage daughter. Eastaway suggests using Zequals (a new coinage of his) when trying to get into the right ballpark. Zqualling strips all but the first significant digit. So 7 stays as 7, but 83 ⇒ 80;  83.78 ⇒ 80; 8,452 ⇒ 8000. Pre-process your sums to Zequals and you won't need a calculator but still get a good enough answer: 98 ÷ 5.3 ≈ 100 ÷ 5 = 20.

 Since we got our solar panels, my life is ruined by the kW app on my device. I put off baking until the sun is giving enough to get the oven to 200°C "for free". I put on the immersion when the sun is making 5.25kW [the max] resolving to wash A Lot of dishes or one elderly body before the water gets cold. Towards the end of Envelope, Eastaway offers a poser: which of the following uses the most electricity:

• fridge
• TV on standby
• shower 
• kettle 

Depending on how much tea you drink and how many oxters you possess, shower or kettle (~ 2000W) will win. Leaving fridge ~50W and TV-standby ~2W in the ha'penny place. Apparently, back in the day, TVs would get warm even when nothing was showing, and there was a desultory campaign to make folk unplug them when they went to bed. Not so since we did away with cathode ray tubes and went LED pixels. I knew all that, but Eastaway then riffs on to point out that the family Yaris runs at 20kW or 10x the kettle! "A 30 minute car journey uses more energy than all your domestic appliances put together: that's something to think about when doing the school run". Yes indeed. It reminds me of my dear old dad who would periodically get cost conscious and go though the house flipping off switches while muttering "every light blazing" and "harumph". And then he'd drive into town and buy another lawn-gizmo to clutter his shed.

Nothing in excess [as Delphi sed μηδὲν ἄγαν] is all very well but some excesses are way more excessive than others. Cows burping methane is waaaay more than human pooting the stuff after Beanz Meanz Heinz even accounting for there being 6x more people than cattle on the planet. We shd all give up the ould burgers [two too many poo R]: mutton, chicken, pork are all easier on the planet and lentils least of all.  But cars are an even bigger burden. 

Go Republic!

Today in Italy it is Festa della Repubblica because 80 years ago, just after WWII, they held a plebiscite [ballot-paper] to determine whether to continue with a monarchy (but without Mussolini, he dead) or go full-metal Republic. It wasn't a slam-dunk, but a 54% majority voted for Republic. This iconic picture by photo-journalist Federico Patellani came to symbolise the optimism that people felt for a new system of governance. The woman in the picture wasn't named as Anna Iberti, from Milano, until decades later. Patellani blasted off an entire roll of film on that shoot and other images are available on the internet. But everyone likes the ragged hole torn in the newspaper of record: it's a metaphor of the shaky start to the Republic: so many parties, so many elections.

The referendum was not held in some provinces of Italy which were a) still occupied by the allies in 1946 and b) diplomatically incertae sedis: 

• The Julian March = Venezia Giulia consisting of Trieste and Fiume which was eventually split between Italy and Yugoslavia.
• Bolzano =  Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol up in the Alps, fell to Italy, although it took a generation for Austria to finally quieten its aspirations for sovereignty there.
• Zara a Italian enclave city deep in Dalmatia, which administratively included two archipelagos out in the Adriatic: Lagosta and Pelegosa. All these are now part of Croatia

Pelagosa was the site of a battle between two submarines during WWI. On 5th Aug 1915, the Italian sub Nereide was sunk by SM-5 of the Austro-Hungarian navy, with the loss of all hands. The Captain of SM-5? Linienschiffsleutnant Georg Ritter von Trapp . . . as in Sound of Music, Anschluß, Christopher Plummer.  Phew! that's today's rabbit-hole: coming up for air and breakfast.

Moral HazMat

There were elements of moral hazard in The Blob's recent voyages round the world of shipping. Shipping companies are profitable because they employ desperate non-union sailors, register the ships in-foreign and power them with bunker fuel [mmm sulphur, love the smell of phenolics in the morning]. We the people and we the planet tolerate these shenanigans because we like cheap Stuff. Ships are complex machines. Hard as it is to assemble these engineering marvels, deconstruction is also difficult. If MegaCorp had to build safe and clean ship-breaking & disposal into their business plan, shipping goods would be more expensive.

End of life issues are also central to Wasteland The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, And Why It Matters (2024) by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. which I just raced through on Borrowbox. At the turn of the century, Fruit of the Loom [remember them?] stopped making apparel in Donegal when government a) imposed a structure of minimum wages and maximum working week b) stopped supporting foreign direct investors by building them sheds c) [mainly] corporate HQ stretched their debt to breaking point. I can now buy cheap shirts in Penneys or expensive shirts in M&S but they are still made by sweated labour in Asia. I haven't actually bought a new shirt this century. My father died in 2001 and I snagged all his blue corporate shirts. When they had worn to rags, my FiL Pat the Salt kindly died to restock my wardrobe. I have the fashion sense of a brick, so dontgiveadamn how many buttons are on my cuffs.

For others, it matters, and/or their Penney's blouse was in rags after three washes; so new kit must be bought. Guess it keeps the economy rolling. But shame prevents sending last year's shirt to landfill, so some people feel better by donating their cast-offs to Oxfam. Oxfam cherry-picks the designer brands, prices and hangs them. They get bought by bougie students. They rest is sent to Oxfam Centraal where it is scooped into heaps with a fromt-loader and compressed into bales. These are shipped to, say, Accra, Ghana where they are auctioned off to fabric re-cyclers. But here's the thing: if the waste stream is top-sliced by Oxfam and its dogoodnik customers, there is only trash left and Ghanaian rag-pickers can't make a living so the whole shipment goes direct to Kantamanto dump. The unintended consequence of your conscientious re-cycling makes life worse for the dispossessed in West Africa. Oliver F-W's book is full of these counter-intuitive factlets. And so many acronyms PET PFAS POP PCB PAH - and that's just Ps.

I thought I was on top of waste and pollution - I used to teach water chemistry after all. But, blimey, I didn't know the half of it. Wasteland will open your eyes . . . and not in a good way. 

In a strange way, in my 'mind', ruminations on Moral Hazard reminded me of a recent interview of Alvin Roth by philosopher-physicist Sean Carroll. Roth has made a career out of looking a 'questionable' markets; and has written a book Moral Economics. One useful definition of 'questionable' in this context is cases where such-a-thing is illegal in some jurisdictions but accepted in others. You can't sell your blood plasma in Ireland or in much of Western Europe; you may only donate it. There would be a shortage of blood and blood-products in European Clinics and Hospitals except for the fact that billions of units are sold into our health systems from the USA . . . where folk can sell their own blood. Maybe we shd think about incentivizing donors here rather than begging them. The Mindscape podcasts all come with added [searchable] transcript so you don't need to listen to the whole thing. Roth was a driver in establishing Kidney transplant rings [whc bloboprev] to maximize the match among donors and dialysees.

Moral Hazard [bloboprev] occurs when The System is structured so that players can make money by taking risks but know that they can walk away if their cunning plan has unintended consequences. Olde Timey miners in the American West made holes in the landscape; abstracted gold, copper, zinc, silver, lead and then loaded up their burros and trotted off to the next prospect. Mammy Someone else would deal with the toxic desert which had been brought to the surface. In this century, executives at Irish Banks made A Lot of money geeing up the Celtic Tiger with doubtful loans . . . but, considered too big too fail, were bailed out by Mammy the Irish Govt with help from we the tax-payers.

Simpson's Gogglebox

I had an Epiphany on 6th of Jan 2026 and stopped watching YT.  60 days later, I acknowledged that by saying No to the algorithm, I'd freed up a lot more time to sit on the sofa page-turning books. Lack of YouTube doesn't affect my diet of earbooks half so much: my borrowbox coups are mostly consumed when I am out and about. I was in Tramore Library on a recent Monday morning returning a book and thought I'd browse the shelves. On my way to non-fiction (300 Social Sciences 400 Language 500 Science 600 Tech) I was surprised to see a Whole Block of shelves labelled Crime Fiction. There was more shelf-metres in that category that All of 300-699. I find that Quite Peculiar but I recognise I'm in the minority on that one.

During a brief gap in my jury-service days, I nipped down to the County Library and borrowed a couple of books. One of which was The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (2013) by Simon Singh [rendered R]. I have name-checked Singh for kicking homeopathy; unaware of the unintended consequences [no placebo] of such righteous punching down. But generally Singh is a force for good: edutaining STEM more widely to diversify the lives of math-anxious folks and maybe making them [feel] smarter.

You're wrong if you know that Matt Groening made 800+ episodes of the Simpsons. The show's success required-allowed the hiring of a rotating roomful [nearly a gross!] of comedy writers. A Lot of them were [Harvard] college educated and their demographic leaned nerd science-guy [sex-ratio ~1F:4M. Singh ploughed through the footage and alt.tv.simpsons and interviewed the writers to winkle out the math references. A lot of them Easter Eggs which lit up the day of those who 'got' them. Getting them might require using VHS to step through a sequence frame by frame to find a subliminal nerdnik gag. The Simpsons writers were cracking jokes about Googol and Googolplex when Sergey Brin was still in High School

I was born too early for The Simpsons, by the time it launched in late 1989, we'd given up the ould telly several years earlier. But, during my YT years, I clocked enough hours to know that the cast live in Springfield, US; that Lisa is a genius and has an older brother called Bart. But I rate puzzles and Easter Eggs, [one of Singh's other works is The Code Book] and my lack of Simpsonology doesn't impinge much on my appreciation of Singh's book.

The book has several intercalated 'exams' where you can test yourself on the larfometer 

• What did 0 say to 8?
• Nice belt!
• What are the 10 kings of people in the world
• Those who understand binary and those who don't.
• Prove that a horse has an infinite number of legs
• Horses have an even number of legs: two hind legs at the back and forelegs at the front. That's a total of six legs, which an odd number of legs for a mammal. The only number which is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore horses have an infinite number of legs.
• Why do computer scientists confuse Hallowe'en and Christmas?
• Because Oct.31 = Dec.25 . . . and bin.11111 = Dec.31 

This seems the best chance I'll ever have to do Simpson's Paradox on The Blob. It forms half of the current book's Chapter 12 in which Congressional votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act are tallied with unexpected results.

Because the Civil War is was still fresh in everyone's memory, having finished only 99 years previously, it is interesting to see how votes compared where Jim Crow hadn't run [North] and where it had [South].

Party	Northern	%	Southern	%	National	%
Democrats	145/154	94%	7/94	7%	152/248	61%
Republican	138/162	85%	0/10	0%	138/172	80%

These data show that, in percentage terms, as expected, Democrats were more in favor of civil rights than Republicans in both North (94% v 85%) and South (7% v 0%) regions BUT when the country as a whole is considered Republicans seem to be more Civil Righty. That's paradoxical, no? It hinges on several numerical diffs which are smoothed out if you consider only % of votes. 

• There are 3x more people and their representatives in the North than in the former Confederate States
• Democrats were the party of power in the South (Lincoln was a Republican)
• There is cross party lack of support for Civil Rights across the South; even the Dems there are luke warm  

One final thing to mention (which is the subject of Singh's Appendix 2) is Euler's Identity

e^πi + 1 = 0

A pair of Kings

 Did I mention that I was doing time as a juror? I did. 

At lunch on the second day, I mentioned to our Jury Foreman that I was going to the theatre that evening, and there was a Dublin train at 16:08. IF the judge finished on the dot of 4 ANDIF everyone stood out of the way ANDIF I could exit through the court rather than through the Jury Room and the warren of first-person-shooter corridors and stairwells THEN I was confident I could trot the 600m to the station and make that train AND have dinner with my extended family before the show. It is the nature of things that at least half our fellow jurors earwigged on the conversation. So when the lawyer was still on his feet at 16:05 two of the jury turned round in their seats and raised their eyebrows in sympathy with my flight plight. It was okay, I had a back-up bus with JJKavanagh at 17:10 and was able to dine on grazed left-overs before we all left for the venue at Club na Múinteoirí on Parnell Square.

The play we were all going to see was II a clever riffle-shuffling of two Elizabethan plays: Edward II by Christopher Marlowe and Richard II [as R] by Wm Shaxsper. It is a matter of historical record that the former was the Gt-grandfather of the latter and that both kings were from their crowns untimely ripped. Plays about monarchs of The Colonial Oppressor might seem a peculiar choice to show in The Republic, hmmm? But made a bit of sense in that it was brought here as part of Wilde Stages; the current incarnation of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. One snitty insider comment was that DGTF, in its 22 year, will find the money and a stage for any ould nonsense so long as it's Gay. 

It was kind of amusing that a) our family party almost doubled the mid-week audience b) was 90% female c) occupied the whole 3rd row. The rest of the audience was middle-aged to elderly blokes. Family members with better gaydar than me (I just wear BLT-Allied merch) said I was probably the only SWM in the dark  The elder king projected Presence as only an Ac-Tor can do. The other, The Beloved's 30-something neffy from ZA, was introduced to us near nekkid and sort-of-fetal broiling under the spotlights as Richard II. Although later he gets up and owns his patrimony. His Presence was why we were all attending alternative theatre way past my bedtime.

Who knows or cares now whether a fellow who died 700 years ago was gay? Not millennials, that's for sure: sex and gender don't seem to make no differ for my students or my childer and their pals. But at least some contemporaries believed that Richard II and esp Edward II preferred company and congress with men. 200 years after the facts, Holinshed's Chronicles maintain that Edward was disemboweled per anum with a red-hot poker "so as no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardlie might be once perceived" at Berkeley Castle in September 1327. 

I was not tooo distracted by the superficial campyness of the perf: corsets, codpieces, chiffon, tinsel crowns and petals. Underneath, the play is an eloquent discussion about the desirability, and even possibility, of renouncing great power and great responsibility [aka shirking one's duty] and walking into a less-stress sunset. That's important: in my family there is a generational thread of service and subservience of self. Is that a Good Thing? Would the world be richer if our ambition genes hadn't been shot off in the war?

Formally: The troublefome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer . . . THE Tragedie of King Richard the fecond,
 

 

Tonn Nua Lá Nua Burj Nua

Two years ago we were part of a  l o o n n g tailback approaching the Luffany roundabout at the N end of the Waterford ring-road. We had seen the future and its works to mangle Lincoln Steffin's 1919 assessment of the neonatal Soviet Union. Because we have become dependent on energy: for the toaster, the uber, the video-calls, the wireless, that X-ray, those youtubes, the zone underfloor heating. Generating electricity is only part of it; creating the infra-structure to distribute, deliver, store. maintain and service the MWs is also required.

cw: I know buggerall 40min worth of advocacy about Offshore Wind 

. . . but should put in the work to know more. Last Tuesday, we invited Dave "Salesforce" Dempsey to talk at the Wexford Science Cafe about Offshore Wind Energy and we got a 40 minute tsunami of data and a hurricane of acronyms [OWE, DMAP, ORESS, GWh, CfD, CBF] and there was time for many questions and informed comments from the floor. One reason why the talk was lucid is that, while Dempsey wrote the book about "Industry Trends in Cloud Computing" [a snip at €130], he's recently had to teach himself the language, politics and numbers of a National Energy Plan. Fewer Curse of Knowledge assumptions! [wch bloboprev]

I think Politics is key here. Offshore was last mentioned at WxScCa when we had the Management of SETU, the ambitious SunnySouthEast multi-campus University, saying they were going to launch MW-engineering and energy-tourism courses at their Wexford Campus. But they don't have a [proper, like, with labs] Wexford Campus! That project is still bogged down in unresolved CPOs, site-changes, finance over-runs, NIMBY, judicial reviews ten years after it was approved in principle. It's like the National Children's NOTpital in small. I don't know if we [the people, politicians, players] are capable of delivering Big. Thinking Big we can do - just listen to blowhards and hurlers-on-the-ditch two pints down in any Irish pub. This is where EirGrid are at:

Tonn Nua [en: New Wave; fr:  François Truffaut nouvelle vague] is currently the most favoured and most advanced Designated Maritime Area Plan (DMAP) to launch the energy future of Ireland. If Tonn Nua works, then they intend to roll out ~50% larger capacity wind-farms further out to sea called Li Ban, Manannan and Danu. Tonn Nua is planned to have 60 x 15MW, bottom-fixed turbines spread over 300 km² more or less shadowing the Costa na Déise from Helvick Head to Hook Head. 60 x 15 = 900MW capacity - enough to power 800,000 homes. I use "shadowing" deliberately, because there will be complaints about The View from people who have bought sea-view retirement homes [with added toasters etc.] all along the coast. Few of them will be complaining on behalf of the crabs and conger which will have their homes turned over in the maelstrom of civil engineering.

Dave Dempsey  is not in the pocket of The Man or FAANG; he's made enough money to be independent. Like successful entrepreneurs, he looks at the horizon, thinks big and is prepared to take risks. Independent, sure; but also a Booster for Offshore Wind Energy. He expresses a resistance is useless vibe about Future Ireland. “I'd say it's better for your children to look at that than look at the Burj Khalifa or the Sydney Opera House when they wake up in the morning". Adding that there are 3,500 jobs to be had at peak rollout.

Any 15MW wind-turbine is massive and this is one reason for off-shore windfarms. The changes at Luffany roundabout were to accommodate the first bottle-neck in the delivery of 80m turbine blades from Belview Port to King's County. The blades for 15MW are 120m long. Road improvements to get those big boys where the wind requires them would consume the entire budget of Transport for Ireland. Offshore has no hedges. Nevertheless, 15MW turbines, their towers and blades, need some (flat and extensive) on shore ground  for assembly and maintenance. And they need it next week. Rosslare Europort plans to tender to provide this service but they are probably too-little too-late too-entitled. Pembroke Dock / Milford Haven across the channel in Wales, with it's deep-water harbour and existing oil refinery is well ahead in that race. In addition the brownfield site at the old [Tata] steel and heavy industry complex at Port Talbot is 100km East but within the logistic catchment and will get mighty devt grants from the UK government. See: it's not just for Tonn Nua: the winner will get the contracts for servicing all the future Irish, Welsh and Cornish Offshore projects.

The other issue is that the Irish Grid does not have the capacity to land anything like 900MW at Great Island at the head of Waterford Harbour. The Greenlink Interconnector from Wales, which comes ashore at Baginbun Co WX and tootles across county to Gt Island, has been live for a year now. But apparently, when Tonn Nua switches on, that route will all have to be dug up again to install fatter cables from there to Great Island. Some questions:

• Who is in charge of future planning at EirGrid?
• Who is cheese-paring at the cabinet table at Govt Centraal?
• Who among them has a Vision for Ireland longer than the next election ?

But there is "with one leap we were free" solution to the imbalance between supply [too much and uneven] and distribution [inadequate] & demand [insatiable]. Tonn Nua is owned by Helvick Head Offshore Wind DAC: a joint venture between ESB and Ørsted A/S, their Danish oppos. Helvick is already talking to 'private' customers to suck up the surplus when the wind blows faster than 10m/s. And at 03:00 hrs when all the toasters and TVs are asleep. Up above, by using "800,000 homes" I've fallen for the standard narrative where demand is imagined as from reg'lar folk just like me: coming home to their 2.4 children at 6pm and ALL switching on the kettle for a nice cup of tea after a hard day staring at a screen. But it's not like that any more: a single data-centre might need 100MW [the same as the entire city of Galway or Waterford] 24/7 and there are A Lot of data centres. They already the consume 3/10ths of Ireland's electricity and who knows how much water for cooling their chips and discs. Dempsey invites us to imagine 'green' industrial parks discretely tucked in behind the dunes: taking in energy from Tonn Nua, Tonn Dó, Tonn Trí . . . and spewing out Gbytes for MegaCorp.

IMO we should all be more intentional and more careful in our energy usage: a shirt could go two days between washes; two baths a week and showers the other days; walk to school; cycle to work; put on a sweater before putting on the central heating. You get my thrift. But I can see Offshore Wind as [part of] the solution to our energy needs. And I'll vote for the party which has a coherent sustainable energy policy in their manifesto: that budgets for safe clean decommissioning when the blades reach the end of their useful life. 

But I will be a very reluctant party to any proposal planning to fill the horizon with turbines which are enslaved to The FAANG Empire.