My twitter account is full of it, all the thousands or thousands of ways things could be better, should be better and especially at the moment, so soon after Greta Thunberg’s passionate speech has been ringing around the internet and stupid people are all trying to silence her for being Aspergers, young and a girl saying uncomfortable things about what’s coming and how little we are prepared for it. Every so often there are little surges of hope as I see announcements of things that seem to indicate changes, or government or business embracing responsibility. Then there are the plain bloody stupid nonsenses that just demonstrate how easily we allow organisations supposed to represent our best interests thoughtlessly continue to destroy for the sake of expediency, for the bottom line and because who the fuck knows.

The roller coaster that is my own little handpicked window on twitter has introduced me to some very cool people doing very cool things. I’ll come back to some of them in another post soon, but for today I want to talk about Collie Ennis. I don’t know him at all, and most of what I read up ’til recently was sort of shipped in via retweets from other accounts, but I’ve enjoyed little snippets of his life like this one:

I’m on a packed Dublin bus with a bag full of crickets. They won’t stop chirping and everyone is staring at me, probably convinced I have bizarre gastrointestinal issues.

— collie ennis (@collieennis) September 20, 2019

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He does super cool things with spiders and cares about stuff, important features in a human being I think. It was through his account that I heard about a stupid, stupid thing that South Dublin City Council did to the wetlands at Seán Walsh Memorial Park in Tallaght. I’m not sure what made this particular piece of news really bug me, I’ve read so many stupid and irresponsible things lately, but it really did anger me, even all the way off down here in Offaly. Basically the story is that there was a thriving little patch of wetlands in Tallaght, it was home to frogs and newts and all manner of the things we are supposed to be protecting. South Dublin CoCo had made commitments to preserve it, they even included it as a highlight in their development plan for Tallaght. It was one of the good news stories, the little surges you get when you think things are picking up. Then South Dublin CoCo arranged in some other de-silting project to dump the dredge and accompanying rubbish on the wetlands and spread it out, compacting it like a building site, burying everything and rendering it a flattened out nothing. Here’s a video to show the damage

Quick video for a clearer picture of what has happened. pic.twitter.com/jiJXEAm1o5

— collie ennis (@collieennis) September 22, 2019

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I read and heard about it after a long drive home through floods in Cavan. There was water pouring over the roundabout there like a healthy young river. We noticed frogs in the flood water andanx iously hoped they were not going to come into harms way. I have always had a soft spot for frogs, and there were so many out that night maybe the thoughts of their wholesale destruction in Tallaght just seemed so particularly bitter. All I could think of was that it must have suited someone’s pocket in some way that that wetland went away. There was a statement that was one of those “sorry not sorry” sort of “explanations” and then, surprisingly there was coverage in newspapers and on the radio which was at least something. RTE reported that South Dublin CoCo were committing to review silt disposal https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2019/0923/1077684-tallaght-wetlands/ but yeah, not a whole lot of good to the thriving communities of frogs, newts and eels that we’ve lost when we desperately needed to support them. This constant need to eradicate scrubland and wetland, to ignore what isn’t chopped back and planted with military precision, to “tidy” stuff up til it no longer supports anything at all drives me mad, let stuff LIVE. We might have some chance of continuing to live ourselves then.

I am mad as hell. We are individual people and we’ve let it be known collectively we want local and national government to start paying more attention, to take biodiversity and climate crises seriously (and stop treating us like poor deluded children who just need to learn to wash out a yogurt pot and put it in the right bin) Instead we get moves to ‘de-designate’ areas protected for bogland conservation to allow more turf-cutting and other development with the Wildlife Bill going to the Seanad tomorrow. What the ACTUAL fuck, I mean, what other planet have these guys got lined up to escape to with their ill gotten gains anyway?