Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

The Deputies should give me the same respect I gave them. It has one positive aspect in that, despite the attempts to shout me down, it shows that we have a very good story to tell in this country.

We might have reasonably expected the Green Party, a party which claims copyright on environmental issues, to mount a well argued and well constructed case, but instead we got a sorry shopping list of misplaced ideas, misinformation, disinformation, distortion and half-baked ideas. Why bother with the real issues when one can indulge in fantasies ranging from the now well worn zero waste concept to whatever the latest hip idea is — the Canadian Guelph system being just the latest to prove irresistibly alluring to the Green Party? It did not deal with the system. There is a Canadian rock group known as the Tragically Hip. That would be a good description for the Green Party.

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