Thursday, November 12, 2009

Irish bishops 'totally' oppose development of Sellafield

IRELAND’S CATHOLIC bishops are “totally opposed” to the redevelopment of the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, west England, and would also oppose any plans to build a nuclear reactor in Ireland, the Archbishop of Cashel Most Rev Dermot Clifford said yesterday.

He was speaking in the context of this week’s announcement by the British government that it had identified 10 sites for the next generation of nuclear power plants in the UK, including at Sellafield.

The archbishop said that while the matter had not yet been discussed by the Irish Bishops Conference, “95 per cent of the bishops are against nuclear reactors”.

He spoke of the threat of Sellafield to people in west England and on the east coast of Ireland, as evidenced in 1957 when fallout from the then-named Windscale covered substantial areas in both countries.

Rather than nuclear power the emphasis should be on developing alternative energies such as wind, wave and solar power, he said.

He was speaking at Dublin’s St Francis of Assisi primary school in Belmayne, Balgriffin, where he launched The Cry of the Earth, a pastoral reflection by the Irish Bishops on climate change.

Referring to the UN Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen next month, he said it was to be hoped “despite the economic recession that the representatives of 170 governments of the world will agree to meaningful targets to cut carbon emissions over the next 10 years”. The ecological crisis was “becoming more urgent by the day” with “not nearly enough” being done about it “at world, national or at local level”.

The Irish bishops were “seeking to raise awareness of the importance and the urgency of taking steps to reverse global warming”, he said.

Columban priest and wellknown climate change campaigner Fr Seán McDonagh recalled that last week UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon “implored religious leaders to make their voice heard in the run up to the Copenhagen conference”. Fr McDonagh noted typhoons in the Philippines and melting glaciers in the Andes as evidence of such climate change.

The Cry of the Earth “marries science, good theology, prayer and action. It calls for an ‘ecological conversion’ from everyone, especially in the way we used fossil fuel,” he said.

Prof John Sweeney, director of the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units at NUI Maynooth, said “the natural world has become a prisoner of human needs”, with humanity now “on the edge of a fairly crucial decade”. We were faced with “the option of getting things right and, if we succeed, we will give children options for the future. If not, they will have fewer options, even when it comes to their standard of living,” he said.

Evidence that the planet is undergoing rapid climate change was “factual and beyond scientific dispute”, he said. It was “urgent that tackling the greatest challenge facing humanity this century be confronted by all sectors of society”, he said.

Justin Kilcullen, director of Trócaire, said the agency was “very engaged with this issue”. His visit to Uganda last week “was dominated by climate change”. He was in an area where there has been prolonged drought, with crops planted twice to no effect.

Locally, the people “had no sense of climate change” or the role the developed world has played in their plight. He pointed out, for instance, that carbon emissions in Ireland were 100 times more than those of Uganda.

This was a reason why he wanted the Government “to take a strong stand” in Copenhagen.
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