Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I have one important question on behalf of the ash owners. The Minister of State has basically admitted something that is true and, in fairness to the Minister of State, it is to his credit. The ash owners are the people who lost out and they remain so. Everybody else got a few bob out of the €4.4 million except them. When the Minister of State is looking at the scheme perhaps compensation is the right thing for them. Will the Minister of State give them a chance and maybe more options than were available previously? Perhaps he will look at the 15 year premium and kick it back - if they get a chance - to year one again. It has gone to three, five or seven years. Let us kick it back and give them a chance to get off the ground again. They have lost their shirts, to put it mildly. It is a horrendous feeling. We can talk about Mercosur and so on but when one thinks about it after hawthorn, ash is the second most important plant in hedgerows. There are some 500,000 km of hedgerow in Ireland. The loss of ash would be a huge loss of carbon sequestration and it would also affect methane filtration. The Minister of State is doing a lot of work in Kyoto, Paris and all those place names but this is a big area here. It is not just for the hurley manufacturers or the ash owners, it is also for the overall communal carbon target of Ireland. I believe we would be losing out. The Minister of State will have to look again at a proper scheme to allow those people to get back on the pitch.