Mr. Duncan Stewart:

We lose nearly 10 million tonnes from our bogs every year. This will continue as long as our bogs remain drained. We are burning peat all over the country. This does not just cause biodiversity damage, but peat is more carbon intensive than coal - it has the highest level of carbon in fuels – and we are burning it in power plants at 30% efficiency. This means that 70% of the energy is wasted. We need to wake up to this incredible inefficiency.

We are mixing co-firing wood with peat and seem to regard it as a sustainable solution. If one wants to burn biomass, one must do so efficiently - for example, through intra-district heating. Combined heat and power, CHP, would be the obvious and best solution. For example, Kerry is burning directly into district heating with biomass locally. CHP provides an 80% to 90% efficiency rating. In comparison, co-firing is a low-grade use of biomass and is an expensive way of generating electricity, given its inefficiency.

Generating power using peat does not stack up. We should be mothballing our peat plants. We no longer need that energy, as our economy has gone down and wind energy is increasing, leading to a surplus in power generation of approximately 20%.

We do not need these peat-powered plants at the moment. The same should apply with coal-burning. We need to look very closely at that because it too is incredibly inefficient.

We have problems on the bogs with turf-cutters and it is mostly the contractors who are causing the problem. Those contractors, obviously, need to be brought into the solution too. If we had a policy to re-wet our bogs and if we could put forward a proposal to Europe to get a carbon offset for a reduction in the emissions caused by the bogs which, it should be noted, are equivalent to all our car transport in Ireland - a figure of 10 million tonnes - we could generate lots of jobs for all of those local people who are turf-cutting by means of long-term sustainable solutions for reinstating all our boglands in the country.