Mr. Ian Lumley:

If I had been aware that housing, which has been mentioned by Deputies Michael Collins and Danny Healy-Rae, was going to be raised, I would have brought the facts and figures with me. The planning system grants permission for thousands of one-off houses annually. When planning permission for a house is refused, there has to be a difficulty with location, water quality or traffic safety. One cannot expect every application for a house on a site to be granted simply because somebody wants to put it there. Very often, the issue is that a family member has another location for a house.

The council should be taking a proactive role in finding serviced suitable sites in other areas where those situations arise. We have actively advocated that policy in many documents down the years.

We fully support the Deputy's concern that we have proper guidelines for solar wind farms and other developments. Some of the initial wind farms caused a major issue as they were developed in a deep peat area and caused peat slides. A very serious issue happened in this area in recent months, resulting in a fatality. There is a need for more effective planning and construction guidelines. Solar development, which is part of the desirable energy mix that we need for the future to get away from carbon sources, needs to be given proper national guidelines, which are not yet in place. The new Department with responsibility for planning was very much caught on the hop on this issue because a new industry has emerged, which is producing its own guidelines, but there should be independent national guidelines separate from the individual sector.

On the issue relating to kelp farming, an advertisement for what is a potentially very problematic development was posted in a local Garda station and most people were not aware of it. We need much more effective structures, information and consultation provisions in order that people, as well as environmental organisations, are aware of what is happening in the area.

The figure with regard to over-fishing comes from the European Commission's fish stock monitoring data. I can supply the Deputy with that information afterwards. There is no evidence that seals are making any significant or major contribution to the collapse of fish stocks in the Irish Sea. The collapse of successive fish stocks has extended over many centuries. In the late medieval period we had major inshore herring fishing which we exported to Europe. Pilchards and sardines were being fished off the coast of Cork as they were off the coast of Cornwall and were also exported to Europe. Those stocks collapsed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The history of human intervention with fish species has been that of over-exploitation of a particular species in an area and then moving on to another with new trawling techniques. We have cited the international fisheries biologist, Daniel Pauly, in our more detailed submission, and he outlines the effect of this. Every time we move on to a new baseline, we forget the abundance of fish life that there was once in the Irish Sea, which is now left to shrimp farming, which is a bottom feeder, with the main species having been fished beyond their replacement propagation capacity.

There needs to be a much more effective community action on burning to identify what is causing this and who are the culprits. It is a criminal matter and there needs to be a properly resourced investigation to get to the bottom of it, to find out who was behind of it, to have prosecutions and an adequate deterrent for the future.