Our landscape and ecosystem has been severely damaged for generations and the process by which it occurs is encouraged and subsidised by the State and the EU, initially to meet self-sufficiency needs, but now in the main because of export profitability. A country as an open air cow factory.

I've lived by Lough Derg all of my life but it was only when I visited Lake Starnberg near Munich a couple of years ago that I realised how incredibly polluted it is. At Starnberg the water was clear. Whereas I grew up believing that these choking algae blooms were somehow "normal".

Our biodiversity is thus at risk of collapsing.

In 2020 the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland published a survey which estimated that there was a 56% decline in Ireland’s native wild plants over the past 35 years. The plants that feed off the excess nutrients are dominating.

The pollution of our rivers & lakes is truly an all-island problem and is caused by (a) excess runoff of nutrients/fertilisers from ever more intensive and industrialised farming practices encouraged by subsidies (b) poorly treated sewage (only half of which is treated to EU standards in the Rep.)

Excellent paper on Digital Skills Development which as a by-product highlights the amount of digital support library workers are doing.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Literally streams of people arriving in saying “the bank sent me here to print my statements, &c.” They then have to be assisted to log on to a PC, assisted to find the website, assisted to logon to their account, assisted to send the document to print, assisted with retrieving and paying for docs.

Thanks Sharon 🙂

Thus slave trading directly from Ireland was extremely rare, but some voyages made it through. In 1718 the slave trading vessel "Prosperity" commanded by a Capt. Hourigan left Limerick for the Gold Coast (Ghana). At Cape Coast Castle the crew purchased 111 enslaved people.

Due to the imposition of navigation laws, Irish merchants were precluded from directly engaging in the transatlantic slave trade (in Ireland) but many were very successful slave traders in the American colonies and in English and French ports (Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes &c.)

"A Neat beautiful black negro girl, just brought from Carolina, aged 11 or 12 years, speaks good English; to be disposed of." (Dublin, 1768)

“To be sold for account of D.F. a Black Negro Boy aged about 14 yrs, remarkably free from vice, a very handy willing servant" (Cork, 1762)

Enslaved Africans were present/being sold in Ireland at least as early as 1591 (in this case a slave ship had been intercepted by Irish mariners) and there are a number of adverts for the sale of slaves in Irish newspapers in the eighteenth century.