Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I know, I appreciate that, but the very fact the Department is not here means it does not understand the subject, it does not appreciate the catastrophic situation we potentially face or it does not care. People have been talking about relevant Ministers. It is time the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine takes a hands-on approach to this issue because this is an agricultural issue. It deals with farms and farms that need our support. The sector I am most familiar with is mushrooms because it is a key component of agriculture in my own county, Monaghan. It is important that people recognise where it came from. The mushroom farmers of Monaghan generally come from small holdings, historically unprofitable, who did what they were asked and diversified. They found an alternative product which meant they moved from being unsustainable and unprofitable holdings to being key economic drivers for a whole region. Now they are telling us and the Minister that they face an existential crisis.

I do not take any industry verbatim when it comes to outline the issues it faces; one always has to balance that with alternative facts that are available. The difficulty the Government has here is that no alternative facts have been presented. There are only those presented by Growing Media and the others here before us. No one has disputed what they have said to the degree that when the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Ryan, was challenged by me and others in the Dáil on the solution, he volunteered that it was the importation of peat from third countries. That is a lunatic position. It is lunacy in economic terms for the operation of the farms I mentioned but even from an environmental perspective, if environmental and climate action concerns were your driving motivator, why would you not take the opportunity to ensure that we have robust environmental rules around the extraction of horticultural peat and ensure that those rules are enforced and monitored in a way that you simply cannot do when a product is imported?

I will reiterate a point that was just made. This goes to the lack of understanding among Ministers in Departments which conflate the use of peat extraction for the use of fuel and energy with that of horticultural peat. We are talking about horticultural peat mass being 0.1% of the overall peat mass in this country. The position that has been adopted is tokenism at its worst. It is doing a huge disservice to those of us who are ambitious and who want to see a robust climate action agenda adopted by the State. It is setting out that our Government's priority is tokenistic measures that do nothing for the environment but put people out of jobs and farms and companies out of business.

I think emergency legislation is necessary to allow peat extraction to take place this year and next year. What would the timeframe need to be for that to happen? There has been some discussion on alternatives. As well as the Minister's much-lauded importation of peat, we have heard of composted green waste as an alternative. Coir, the extract from coconuts, and also products such as perlite and vermiculite which are sourced from open cast mines. Can our delegates outline the challenges that these alternatives present.