Mr. Seamus Boland:

First, it is a pleasure to see Senator Paul Daly. Yes indeed, we soldiered in all those years and it was a great experience. As I said at the beginning, we mentioned Rochfortbridge as an example. There may well be somebody who will trump up behind us and tell us to forget it and that it is not possible. The reason we mentioned it as an example was, as Deputy Fitzmaurice also pointed out, they are already digging up the peat and they are already in there.

Huge amounts of bog are being lifted in order to get to sand and gravel. As I said earlier, if we had thought about this correctly, we could have created a situation where the peat, which is only suitable for mushrooms, could have been properly dug by the expert contractors and drawn away. To us it was such a simple solution that it could not be ignored. As for the question about anybody taking the mantle, the answer is "no", not so far. As mentioned in the report, there are a number of stakeholders like Cement Roadstone Holdings, Westmeath County Council and others that need to be involved in this discussion. The relevant Minister or Ministers need to be involved as well. For us it was an example. There may be another quarry like that around the country. We did not see it but there may be. Nobody has yet taken up that mantle.