John Arnold: I’m all for solar panels, but on roofs, not on good farm land

I had fairly mixed emotions last Saturday - sadness and anger.

The winter is here with longer nights, shorter days, and more time spent indoors. We’ve no central heating in the house - never had it, and I suppose we’ll hardly invest at this hour of our age.

All the talk nowadays is about insulation and keeping heat in and cold out. This BER rating business is all the go if you’re selling or buying a house.

Apparently, an AO rating is the very, very best and if you get that score apparently, you’re burning no fossil fuels and supposedly have very low energy bills.

Well, that’s great and mighty altogether, but I’m not convinced.

I know all about global warming - well, I know a fair bit I’d say - but then there’s new surveys and reports coming out all the time.

I’m not a climate change apologist as I can see - even in my 50-plus years farming - the huge changes that have taken place. I can recall as a child the huge and predictable changes between the four seasons each year. Now everything is mixed up, trína chéile, and there’s such changes that youngsters often don’t believe me when I tell them about the winter season in the 1960s.

No, I’m not looking back through ‘soot-tinted glasses’ and just imagining things.

We always grew an acre or more of potatoes. I’d say the money mam made from selling Kerr’s Pinks, Records, and Golden Wonders paid for the five of us in school.

We’re in November now and when I was young you knew the winter was here. OK, it didn’t change overnight on the last day of October, but over the span of a week or two we’d go from the sharp autumn weather into the throes of winter. Frost every day -we were often without water for ‘man and beast’ for days on end in December or January.

Snow wasn’t a wonder of the world as it is today - just something we expected and accepted.

Unless something went badly wrong, we’d have all the potato crop dug by now. They were initially stored in straw-lined pits out in the field. Plenty straw underneath and all over the tubers to prevent the frost getting in. When the potatoes were pitted we’d build them up a bit in the middle. Covered then with straw, and finally the pit was covered with a thick cover - three to six inches of earth from the field. This was patted down so rain ran off.

For all the world, the earth-covered potato pits looked like giant Battenberg cakes out in the field!

Winters were always cold, not like the Novembers and Decembers of today when grass is still growing. There was something natural and ancient about the changing of the seasons back then. As sure as night follows day, once winter came, could spring be far behind?

Ah yes, all’s changed now, utterly changed.

No doubt we, society - the world - has to stop destroying this planet of ours, but I wonder to myself sometimes about so-called progress.

Getting back to the BER rating, I reckon our home, built when Parnell was 30 and Padraig Pearse just four years old, would have an X or a Y rating!

Now, I’m not complaining or giving out about my ancestors. They built a sturdy house in 1875 when the word insulation wasn’t even in the dictionary!

As I write these words, I’m in my shirt sleeves. It’s cold and showery outside, but I’m grand and warm ‘below in the room’. There’s a great fire going in the stove and another above in the dining room in the open fire. Our Turf House is half full but last Saturday we were just stocking up a bit more for the Christmas and the New Year.

My sadness on Saturday was because we had to cut down two oak trees. They can live for several hundred years so, even in tree terms, these 37-year-old oaks are but juveniles. Yes, I was upset at having to end the life of something that had such potential.

A fully grown oak is magnificent -we have one in the Long Field and another in Paircaleasa, and they are simply inspiring. Not just their sheer size and majesty but the leaves, the acorns, the gnarled rugged bark and branches.

A haven for flora and fauna, our 1990 oaks were planted kind of by mistake! Back then, our glen was a wasteland. Under a new forestry scheme at that time we got a contractor to plant more than 3,000 ash plants. Old, wise people said you should only plant ash ‘where one can hear the sound of running water’ and our glen matched that requirement.

It was only maybe four or five years later that we spotted something strange about one area of our young plantation. We got in a forester and he explained that there must have been a mix-up.

The ashplants had come in bags of 100 - they looked like dead twigs at the time in 1990. Anyhow, somehow, somewhere along the line, we got two bags of oak saplings instead of all ash.

In fairness, the Forestry Company that did the planting for us offered to take up the oaks and replace them with ash - as was the original plan. We said ‘leave well enough alone’ and so our couple of hundred oak trees are growing away - slowly, yes, but surely.

So, for close on three decades the oak and ash were good growing neighbours. I was sad on Saturday having to cut down the two oaks but we had no option as we wanted to gain access to the ash trees.

Ah yes, those sad, dying ash trees. Dying away by degrees because someone, somewhere in some well-paid job allowed uncertified ash plants into Ireland.

At the time, the only plants that could be left into this country for planting were those that were guaranteed and certified as being disease-free. Unfortunately, those plants that came in brought that dreaded disease we now call ‘ash die-back’.

Yes, maybe the disease would have come in borne by the wind - we’ll never know. All I know is my ash trees, and millions more all around this country, are dying a slow death – and all because someone, somewhere ‘took their eye off the ball’.

Why shouldn’t I be angry? Since the 1870s this home has been heated by the timber of ash trees. You cut down an ash tree and what happens? The stump or branch shoots out again and in a few decades more timber is ready for use. I call that renewable energy - it’s not a fossil fuel, but now we are being told that soon we can’t even burn home grown timber - madness.

Another thing that makes me very angry is the solar panel debate. I’m all for them - why wouldn’t I be? Free energy from daylight and sunlight -we’d be stupid not to harness it.

Yes indeed, but put solar panels on roofs and not in perfectly good farming land.

We are told that by 2030 we must reduce our carbon emissions by 40% - I’m all for that so why aren’t solar panels compulsory on the roof of every single new house? All around I can see hundreds of houses, and ne’er a solar panel on any single one of them.

That seems to be a Government non-policy - now, maybe there’s a very good reason, but if there is maybe someone might please tell me!

So we’ll be burning ash timber for the winter and hopefully into the future.

Ah yes, indeed, I am angry and sad at having to destroy those two fine young oak trees to get at the dead and dying ash. By right, those oak and ash trees should be growing as neighbours for decades to come.

As Joyce Kilmer wrote back in 1913:

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.