Regina Doherty (Fine Gael)
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I thank colleagues for allowing me to come in today to speak on an industry that it very important to me in north County Dublin. I thank the Minister of State for attending today because she is not the only person responsible for fixing this but she sits at the Cabinet table with officials from the other two Departments who are responsible. Therefore collectively, the three Departments have an obligation to the Minister of State who covers horticulture and is the champion of this industry, to provide a solution. What we are witnessing is a master class in procrastination. We are going around in circles for the past number of years and we have absolutely no productive solutions to filling - what the Minister of State has just called - the interim period before we get beyond peat. That is the problem and the reason we are sitting here talking so frustratingly. We are going around in circles and I think that is actually the plan of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, with responsibility for local government and planning; the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications; and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. We will go around in circles for so long but what we are actually doing is killing the single most climate-friendly industry in this country by inaction on our watch. The people who are responsible for the demise of this industry are those in government and that includes the Minister of State and me.

I am really frustrated not least by her statements today that the report we only got this morning cites the lack of engagement as the reason we cannot have proper recommendations in this industry. I bring the Minister of State back to the first working group report which had 12 months of engagement. People gave up their time, month in, month out, to come up with three recommendations that would fix this industry. What did we do? We ignored it and decided we did not like the results of that one so we set up another report. We then commissioned KPMG and it gave us a report. What did we do with those recommendations? We ignored those as well. Then we got Grant Thornton in and ignored its recommendations. Now we have Mr. Séamus Boland's report and because the industry was posed a disingenuous question and asked to tell us what they had in their back sheds, keeping the businesses alive, we are now going to say it will not engage with us therefore we need to put a call out that they work together with us. As if them telling us what they have in their back shed will prompt us to recognise the single recommendation that will fix this problem is to draft primary legislation to make the dual consent legislation a single consent mechanism which will then allow people to engage with what the Minister of State has called on numerous occasions today, a complex legal process. It is so complex nobody can get through it.

The Minister of State is the champion of this industry and its single biggest raw material is not available. My only question to her today is to inquire if she has asked the other two Ministers, who are responsible for giving us our cross-Government approach to this problem, to draft primary legislation to bring forward single consent to allow a small amount of peat be harvested locally in Ireland to keep this industry alive. I represent people in organisations in north County Dublin such as Tully's nurseries, Dockrell's farm, and Sunglow nurseries who are going to go out of business if we do not give them a replacement to what the Minister of State calls alternatives, which are not going to come for years. Has the Minister of State asked both of her colleagues who sit at the Cabinet table with her, to draft single consent legislation to allow local providers of peat in this country to extract for local use for our horticultural industry?