The Last Word on The Environment: Joint Hottest August Ever
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What is the good news about Irish cities cutting emissions and pollution‑related deaths?
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The last word on today FM. John Gibbons, sorry, but the Climate Minister Dar O'Brien ate into your time this week. Start with some good news for us, though. Will you tell us about the Irish cities that are succeeding in cutting emissions and slashing pollution related deaths?
Yeah, good evening, Matt. Yeah, as you say, this is a relatively good news story. It comes from the Lancet countdown. They looked at eight hundred and fifty cities over the last uh twenty years or so, and and Dublin, Cork, uh Galway, Limerick, and Waterford were included in the study. And what we see across the board are significant declines in uh deaths from air pollution. Now this won't be That is very good news. Very good news, yeah. And again people will probably understand why. Well just
explain what are the reasons for it in Ireland? What's been done to improve things?
Okay, well if we go back to Mary Harney in nineteen ninety, uh she of course famously brought in the ban on smoky coal in the Dublin City area. That has directly saved probably hundreds, possibly thousands of lives over the last uh three decades.
And it's not just the saving of lives, it's a better quality of life for everybody else.
Absolutely. I mean the the air pollution and and the the the fine particulate matter that is carried in the burning of solid fuels like uh like coal and so on and and peat indeed, uh these are hugely uh injurious to health. They fill our hospitals, especially in the winter. You notice the big winter surges in hospitals. Many of those are to do with air pollution when people uh light their fires. Now, respiratory illnesses as a result of that.
How did the historic ban on smoky coal in Dublin improve air quality and save lives?
seen Matt over the last number of years, of course, is that uh say in the last fifteen years, uh with the rise of A-rated houses, we're now adding housing to the stock that doesn't include uh chimneys. Because again, uh The the smoke from emissions or the from domestic fires is another significant contributor to air quality uh declines. So this is a good news story. Uh in some
I can also suggest you don't see as well, even with more modern day cars and trucks and buses, you don't see as much of the exhaust fumes belching bad material into the air as you used to.
That's right. And that's one of the kind of paradoxes. Uh like the the diesel engines of twenty-five, thirty years ago, you you'd see the exhaust uh puffing out of them. What's happened since, of course, with improvements in technology, uh, catalytic converters and so on, they've captured some of that. But of course, number one, they're not capturing the the carbon dioxide. And number two, say in the case of diesel, there's still huge numbers huge amounts of PM two point fives. These are the very fine uh Particulate matter that gets deep into the lungs. It's so fine that it can pass, say, between the lungs and the brain. And so people are we're still suffering from particulate pollution. And we've seen Matt, for example, in cities like London and Paris, where they've they have introduced uh these ultra low emission zones, huge declines in uh illness and death uh as a result of air pollution.
So while we've made progress in Ireland, and for example, we've seen uh sixty nine percent percent drop in premature deaths from dirty fuels. And those people, for example, who who believe we should have spent a billion euros in keeping diesel cheap, I would say one of the many uh hidden costs in that, right, while it may have its economic component is we're adding hugely to to human misery. We're filling our hospital beds uh because of decisions to artificially maintain the
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the good news about Irish cities cutting emissions and pollution‑related deaths?
0:00–1:57
2
How did the historic ban on smoky coal in Dublin improve air quality and save lives?
1:57–4:19
3
Why are modern diesel subsidies considered a hidden cost to human health?
4:19–5:48
4
What are the arguments for financing a rapid transition to electric heavy‑goods vehicles?
5:48–8:06
5
How does Ireland’s current solar capacity compare with the minister’s claims?
8:06–10:02
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Word with Matt Cooper
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