Journal for cmeiners

Everyone knows that, due to the excessive amount of rain that falls here, it is quite green in Ireland. But Ireland is also "green" in another way,an environmental way. The Irish are quite clever about conserving energy.

First off, every electrical outlet here has an on-off switch. When the outlet is off, there is no electrical current, which definitely helps save energy. There is also very little central heating here; in my apartment, every room has it's own heater, and so when you're not in a room, you can leave the heat off in that room, and only heat the rooms you are using. At the same time, these heaters heat up quickly and are quite effective, so when you enter a room, you don't have to stay cold for too long. All the doors swing shut on their own, to keep heat inside the rooms that are being heated. When I stayed with a host family in Connemara for a few days, I was always leaving the doors to the living room and dining room open, and my host mother would come along behind me and politely shut the door behind me. It's something I don't even think about, being from the US where most homes have central heating, but it's a very important way of conserving energy here, since electricity and natural gas prices are through the roof.

At every supermarket you visit in Ireland, if you ask for a plastic bag for your groceries, you will be charged 22 cents. It's a governmental effort to discourage the use of plastic bags, and to encourage reusable bags. If you look around at the other shoppers at Dunnes or Tesco, you will notice that everyone carries old plastic bags or reusable bags. I think this would be a great thing to implement in the US, but I can also imagine American shoppers throwing a stink over that. Although, perhaps the Irish initially were upset about this new regulation in the beginning, and simply got used to it. I'm still having a hard time remembering to bring old bags with me to the store when I go shopping.

While the Irish seem quite concerned with conserving electricity, they do not seems to care about littering. The Irish Business Against Litter alliance voted Galway "clean by European standards" this year.. That's hard for me to accept, because all around the NUI Galway campus and around my apartment complex, there is litter everywhere. There are also these small areas that look like impromptu garbage dump sights, with a high concentration of pop bottles and potato chip bags everywhere. In the River Corrib, if you stand on one of it's many bridges and look down into the water, you can see old bikes and car parts, sometimes even the odd bed head. It's crazy. If this is a clean city, I shutter to think of what Cobh looks like (it was voted "seriously littered").

Obviously, the Irish and Americans have different priorities when it comes to the environment. I think we Americans could learn a lot from the easy, simple ways in which the Irish conserve...but I'm grateful for our significantly less littered cities.