‘No negatives’ to Mullingar being Decarbonising Zone

Mullingar’s new designation as Westmeath’s first Decarbonising Zone should have “no negatives” for the town’s people and businesses, according to a local council official.

The local authority announced last Tuesday that Mullingar had been chosen as the county’s first Decarbonising Zone.

Under the 2019 Climate Action Plan, every local authority had to nominate a town or townland to be their Decarbonising Zone. A Decarbonising Zone (DZ) is defined as a spatial area in which a range of climate mitigation, adaptation and biodiversity measures and action owners are identified to address local low carbon energy, greenhouse gas emissions and climate needs to contribute to national climate action targets.

In a statement issued last Tuesday the council said that Mullingar will become “an important testbed for the various strategies plans and ideas, that will contribute to the overall target for the country to become carbon neutral by 2050”.

Speaking to the Westmeath Examiner, Jonathan Deane, senior engineer, Water Services, Environment and Climate Change, said that while the details are still being finalised at a national level, “there should be no negatives” for Mullingar and its people.

“We don’t really know how it will be rolled out yet, but we were at pains to explain to the councillors that they should be no negatives. It’s not going to mean that things that can happen in other towns in Westmeath can’t happen in Mullingar. It’s not as if there will be a ban on industry or one-off houses or things like that.

“There should only be benefits for the town rather than negatives.”

During the public consultation phase, the council received submissions from two community groups, one from Mullingar and one from Moate. Mr Deane says that the council decided to go with Mullingar for a number reasons. “There are advantages to Mullingar. It lends itself to active travel in the sense that it has a nearly full circle of a high quality cycle path around the town, the Royal Canal Greenway. From that point of view it is very positive. There are a number of active travel schemes planned for Mullingar over the next number of years.

“There is a large part of Mullingar that is up for redevelopment around Blackhall. There is a sustainable energy community in the barracks and they have been very active. Getting community buy-in is very important as well.

“The idea was the each local authority select one town or townland, trials everything in that particular town. Works out what has worked and what has not worked. What can be tweaked. What was good value for money. What didn’t have much positive public engagement and then you roll out the process to the rest of the county. This exact same procedure is happening in every other county.

“The word testbed just means that if, for example, we were going to have increased electric vehicle charging points, we would do it first in Mullingar to see how we got on and try and learn from it. Then we will roll it out to the rest of the county,” he said.

Noting that decarbonising a county is a “hell of an ask and there will be a lot of debate about the right way and the wrong way of doing it”, Mr Deane reiterated that for Mullingar being chosen as Westmeath’s first Decarbonising Zone, “there should only be benefits for the town rather than negatives”.

“We should be more likely to get national funding for particular initiatives ahead of other towns. I would emphasise that this will only be in the short term and very quickly all other towns should catch up.

“The objective in all of the national guidelines is that we should be reducing carbon usage by seven per cent year on year and if in year one we can try to do it for one town, and then try and roll out the strategies to all the other towns,” he said.