IT’S ALMOST two years since I was approached and commissioned by Penguin to write a book – my first – about Ireland and the climate emergency. While genuinely chuffed to be asked, I did also have something of an inkling – or premonition – about what I might be letting myself in for. Well, I thought I did, but it still turned out to be one of the toughest tasks I’ve ever undertaken.
After all the preliminaries, including sketching out and agreeing a detailed briefing document and book plan were completed, work got underway in earnest in January 2024, with delivery of the first draft originally slated for October of that year. This turned out be a rather optimistic schedule. In sho, 2024 was a long, long year.
By December last, I was still writing, and the original target word count of around 80,000 had ballooned out towards 130,000, as I scrambled to throw my net as wide as possible, and to cover off every possible angle, including almost 1,000 notes and references. This approach, it turns out, works far better in academia than when trying to craft a book for a general audience that is actually likely to be ever read.
While I may not have appreciated it at the time, my Penguin editor ripped away over 50,000 words and restructured the chapter sequence to make it flow more logically. By early 2025, the chrysalis was being gradually shed and the book was beginning at last to take shape.
The rounds of editing, stretching over around three months, were brutal, as we argued back and forth, as I fought (usually in vain) to have some pet theme or sidebar spared from the spike. I won a few battles, but then again, too few to mention. By the second quarter of 2025, lots of my references were already out of date, and so part of the process was to update as many as possible with the latest available data.
By definition, any book is going to represent a snapshot in time, but at least you want its shelf life to last as long as possible. Finally, and after some delays in the printing process, a box with 10 advance copies finally landed in my hands on August 14th, a slightly surreal moment.
The book, which is billed as a ‘bracing critique of the bad decisions that have put Ireland into such a vulnerable position on food and energy security as well as climate mitigation and adaptation’. Part of this, as I explore, is down to complacency, at political, state and media level, about the real risks that face Ireland, while this is also a story of how vested interests have stymied and blunted Ireland’s response to this unfolding tragedy.
Names are named. Feathers are ruffled and the status quo is called out for the dangerous sham that it is. Unless they manage to ignore it entirely, expect the Usual Suspects to be up in arms over their warts-and-all portrayal in this book. Given the amount of soft PR and endless media space they already enjoy, I make no apologies for putting the boot in firmly.
There is also a bracing critique of our media and how it has, with some honourable exceptions, failed utterly to sound the alarm on the climate emergency. As the state broadcaster and given its large budget and public service remit, RTÉ comes in for close – and largely unflattering – scrutiny. In unrelated news, there has been an eerie silence emanating from Montrose in terms of any of their talk or current affairs programmes wanting to discuss the book or do an interview. Guess this climate nonsense is yesterday’s news, at least as far as RTÉ is concerned?
The book is formally launched on Thursday September 4th at an event in Dublin, and will be available in bookshops nationwide from that day. I also recorded an Audiobook version of the book over the summer, and this will also be released on services like Audible, Spotify etc. from September 4th. If you’d like to have my dulcet tones in your ear for eight hours or so, now you know where to go. Will discuss the actual content of the book in more depth in future ThinkOrSwim postings, but in the meanwhile, do hope you’ll consider picking up a copy and giving it a read.
