Paul Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Normally I would say that Deputy Martin Browne has already said what I was going to say and I will not rehearse it, but I will rehearse it because it needs to be said again.

The question is as much for the Chair as it is for the Department and the IFFPG. Where do we go from here? As a member of this committee, I am not comfortable. I probably will be told that this committee's duty is to hold the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to account for an oversight in the Department and this is not the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. I will pre-empt that answer. As an administrator, one of the answers of Mr. Moloney to Deputy Kehoe, when the Deputy used the analogy of me and him or one of us disappearing off the radar, as it were, was that they would not chase farmers to recycle. I do not blame Mr. Moloney for that. He is a businessman and he is trying to keep a company afloat, even though it is not for profit. If I were paid to do a job for somebody, I would not go chasing them to know why they are not asking me to do it.

The IFFPG is legal and above board. Do not get me wrong. I am not accusing anyone of anything illegal because the company has its contract and its licence which states it only has to reach 70% but is being paid for 100%. I cannot get my head around it. The company does not seem to care or know where the balance - be it 10%, 20% or 30% - is. Is it in the bog holes of Ireland? Is it buried? Is it blowing around the bushes? This involves the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. That Department is saying it does not chase it up and maybe the farmers are putting it in their recycling, in their wheelie bins. Maybe there are 2 million bales of surplus silage being made every year. I would say it will be sold cheap next year. I will have a bit of that, if we are building up 2 million surplus bales of silage every year. We were importing a couple of years ago. There was a fodder crisis. The answers do not stack up.

It is flawed. It is bordering on - I do not know whether I can use the word - illegal. We are charging somebody for a service, we are not providing the service and we do not care that we are not providing the service. We have no follow-up. What I am hearing here all evening is that we do not know where the balance of the product that we have been paid to recycle is and we do not care. It is okay from IFFPG but I cannot believe that is what I am hearing from the Department. The Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications has responsibility for the environment. There is the equivalent of 2 million bales of plastic per year unaccounted for out there in bog holes, buried and blowing around the place and the Department does not care. The Department is quite happy to reissue IFFPG's licence, as it has for the past 20 years, and 2 million more bales next year will be unaccounted for. Do we care about the environment?

It is the farmers who are paying for this. It is the farmers who are getting hammered every time I turn on a radio about every angle of the environment, not only plastic. The farmer is being charged when he or she goes in, as it were. The farmer is being charged a levy that is going straight to IFFPG to recycle the plastic and it is not being recycled.