I was delighted to see Pat Rabbitte, the Minister for Energy and Communications, announce that he was going to publish a green paper, ie a discussion document, on Ireland’s future energy policy. We don’t often have this sort of approach in the country, where opinions and submissions are invited from the public and informed members of the individual sectors.

Ireland has fallen between a number of energy stools. France chose to go the nuclear route. This has given it a plentiful supply of cheap electricity and its households and industry are at a distinct advantage.

For historical reasons, Germany has been nervous about nuclear energy. After the Japanese disaster it has set its face totally against it and went down, at enormous expense, the renewable route.

It’s not just wind energy, but also large-scale, nationally-incentivised biodigesters on farms. At the same time, it has offset the extra cost to industrial users by giving them a special discount.

Norway and Sweden have majored on hydro power, while Britain faces a potential electricity supply crisis if it does not start a programme to generate extra capacity very soon. It is leaning towards nuclear.

In fact, I was horrified recently to see a letter to an English institution saying that over the next few years their electricity suppliers may have to impose a blackout period when no electricity would be available for up to 20% of the time.

No wonder they have put in such incentives for the on-farm generation, but it’s only a drop in the ocean and they have decided that for purely political reasons there will be no more on-shore windfarms.

The proposed massive Irish windfarm projects have been a casualty of this abrupt change in policy. Where this leaves Ireland is not clear. Like the unjust steward in the Gospel: “To beg we are ashamed, to dig we are not able”, or we cannot afford to put in place a credible biomass or biodigester policy.

We have refused to countenance nuclear so far, we have neither oil nor coal and our turf deposits and hydro capacity are tiny, so we import over 95% of our energy needs.

What the bulk of the population seems not to have realised is that energy has become much more expensive.

A simple example. In 1970 a barrel of oil cost approximately 60lbs (27kg) of wheat. Today that same barrel of oil costs approximately 900lbs (408kg) of wheat.

To go from 60lbs to 900lbs of a real product is an enormous increase and, in my view, this simple statistic is responsible for the increase in wealth exhibited by the Middle-Eastern Arab states.

We are paying the price. As Simon Coveney put it, we all want electricity but we do not want pylons and we all want renewable power but we don’t want wind turbines.

Something has to give, or at least the general population needs to know the basic facts surrounding the cost of essential energy.