Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the director to the meeting and thank him for his presentation and for answering our questions. When we talk about rewetting, we are talking about returning land to a state in which it was in the past. In Ireland, we are talking principally about marginal land that would have been drained in the past half century. We are probably not talking about other lands. That is where most of our peaty soils are. Something that has come up in our parliamentary discussions and various committee discussions in the past number of years is the Arterial Drainage Act. I do not know if it is something the director has looked at because it is Irish legislation. The Act was introduced in the 1940s principally as a labour activation measure at a very difficult time in this country. It brought marginal land into agricultural use. Prior to that, a lot of that land would not have been used for agricultural purposes. What we are looking at now is possibly restoring some of that land - I will not say a lot of it because that work needs to be done and we will have the land use review. The initial phase of it will be presented at the end of this year. Is the director still with us?