I would like to have a word with the people who believe a country that cannot repair a ha-ha wall for less than €660,000, and which paid more than €300,000 for a bike shed, should now be prioritising nuclear energy.

So, riddle me this, nuclear-atarians: how do you propose Ireland actually builds this infrastructure? To understand why this feels unfathomable, let’s look at what building a nuclear energy capability actually entails.

Only about roughly one fifth of a nuclear programme is actually about the “nuclear” part. That involves reactor physics, figuring out the whole uranium thing – which is harder than it sounds, and it sounds hard – and radiological planning. This fifth is also the most specialist. We have precisely zero expertise in any of this, but it is also the least of our worries. It’s actually the other four fifths of a nuclear project where the trouble lies.

The first thing we would struggle with is needing a teacher’s note to allow the project to exist in the first place. Given that a reactor is a nationally strategic project, even a consented reactor would need to survive the bloodbath of judicial reviews that would follow. If we could actually pass something of this scale, Galway would probably have a ring road.

In remarkable about-turn, US........

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