Mr. John Butler:

I would like to comment on stakeholder engagement which has been spoken about. Our organisation put forward the suggestion, which I want the committee to take on board, that each bog due to be rehabilitated should have a local committee with all stakeholders involved because there is no better place to start and to gain knowledge than at local level. With the greatest respect to ecologists, scientist and all the reports about rehabilitation from Bord na Móna, which I have read most of, we are concerned on a number of front, one of which is local engagement. We want to see good local engagement set up, not just a couple of phone calls or Zoom meetings. We want to see a local committee that recognises and feeds in to a committee such as this one or a national oversight body. Each bog that is taken out of production and is rehabilitated should have a local committee, which includes all stakeholders.

The second issue that concerns us is the long-term plan. I have read a number of the proposed draft plans and I accept that they are very good and much work and scientific research has gone into them. The long-term plan seems to be for the duration of the integrated pollution control, IPC, licence. As soon as the licence is surrendered, what happens after that and who looks after it? These bogs will need oversight and people to look after them, and they will need work done on them. Especially when the rehabilitation starts, hopefully we will see new forms of wildlife coming back to the bog. We need to have a proper management structure in place.

What worries me a small bit is that over the past few years we have had a number of different committees, surveys and bodies and funding coming from different places towards the bogs. Do not get me wrong, that is all very good. I like money being directed towards the bogs but is there joined-up thinking on this? Do we know exactly what is happening to all the bogs around the country? Are there too many Indians here and maybe not one chief? Who is doing the oversight on the rehabilitation work done to date? We know there have been test sites done. We know there have been test places taken. I have seen one or two instances where drains have been blocked.

The lack of an overall plan worries me slightly. We do not want to see a situation like that involving the person Mr. Curley alluded to earlier. This person has done tremendous work on bog rehabilitation in England. His suggestion, which we have included in our submission, is that 90% of the money should be spent on the ground and 10% spent on administration and paperwork. Is there already information there, do we have access to it, and how best should the work be done or would we prefer to spend money looking for something we have already? We would like to see a co-ordinated strategy that goes back to when we started on this road in 2015 or 2016. We need to bring everyone into a room so we know exactly where we are, what has been done to date, what is proposed to be done in the future so that we can all be a part of that at local and national level.