Mr. John Neenan:

We have had maybe three meetings with the officials of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. I have to say the people we spoke to are very committed and working very hard on trying to find a solution. Their solution is the problem. The working paper that was prepared and submitted and which people have referred to, at the end of paragraph 6, states:

Finally, it is accepted across Government that a level of peat extraction is required for the domestic horticulture sector ... Furthermore, it is accepted by Government that the fastest route to compliance lies in small scale bogs of less than 30 hectare bogs and this pathway has been successfully tested on other small-scale bogs in the recent past.

That was based on completely wrong and misleading information.

When we were having discussions in the working group, we were told by people in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage that the sub-30 ha route section 5 exemptions were granted. Eventually, we discovered there were three section 5 exemptions granted, two in Roscommon and one in Westmeath, and they were based on removing turf cutting from special areas of conservation, SACs, and relocating them. Deputy Fitzmaurice would have played a good part in doing that and the people are very grateful. The other six applications that went in to the local authorities, Meath, Longford and Westmeath, were all referred to An Bord Pleanála and An Bord Pleanála ruled that all of them required planning. That is the problem with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. It thought it had the solution based on information that was not correct and now it does not know what to do. Those are the facts.