Mr. Eoin Darby:

There are a lot of thatched cottages around the country that are actually covered over. They were covered in tin at some point. They did not want to take them down, but they wanted to protect them from further rot or whatever.

Two years ago, just when I was going through the planning permission process, I was driving through a town in north county Dublin and I saw a digger going straight through one of these roofs, with the dust, the hay and straw coming off it. I am going through all of these hoops to try to get a new thatched roof put on and there was a developer just putting a digger bucket straight through a roof that has probably been there 150 years.