Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The two go hand in hand. I will raise that with the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Varadkar, and will ask him to reply to Deputy Healy-Rae. In respect of the first issue the Deputy raised, clearly the appropriate time to have a deeper analysis of what the European directive actually meant would have been when it was being drafted in the first instance, many years ago now. As Deputy Healy-Rae is aware, when directives are signed off, they are binding. The situation then arose whereby particular bogs were deemed to be exceptionally sensitive under that directive and therefore were outside the remit of turf-cutting. Perhaps if the issue had been looked at in a different way in the very beginning, it might not have been-----

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