The Dealer likes to keep up to date with the latest news on the continent.

So while reading a recent edition of Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, I was interested to come across an article about an enormous power plant located in Belchatow in central Poland.

Belchatow may be a very appropriate name for this town, given the volume of carbon being belched out by a single power plant in the town. Every year, Belchatow’s coal-fired power plant emits about 40m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere – double the emissions of all of Irish agriculture and equal to about two-thirds of Ireland’s total emissions.

If the EU is serious about reaching net zero-carbon emissions by 2050 under its so-called Green Deal, it has to start by shutting down enormous pollutants such as these fossil fuel power plants. Culling suckler cow numbers in Ireland seems farcical when one power plant in Poland can do so much damage to the environment.