Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Everywhere else the water flows downhill. How could a house located downstream from an SAC possibly affect the mountain behind it through its septic tank? In this case, the poor house applicant has spent €300 or €400 on a screening operation to show it will not do any damage.

One is located 10 km from the lake, yet this little house is supposed to destroy the lake in some way. All these tests are carried out by the county council on the most vulnerable septic tanks and we then discover that the tanks are doing virtually no damage and that municipal wastewater plants are the biggest single cause of pollution. That is a fact that we all know. These designations are being used to stop the building of houses in the countryside. There are zealots who will try to use anything to stop houses being built in rural areas. The problem is that a public that wants to love its countryside and to be at one with nature is finding that regulation is making it a lot less sympathetic.

The Minister is aware of a farcical situation that we will discuss in another forum. Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, has planning permission for a road through Connemara but it cannot agree method statements to allow the road to be constructed. In the meantime, people's lives are at risk every day because they are obliged to travel on a substandard road as a result of the fact that we cannot find a way of building the new road. It would be much better for the ecology of the region if the new road was built without putting the habitats at risk or without levels of testing that are impossible to meet.

There are two things I find very difficult to understand. One is the way the precautionary principle is applied. If one applies the precautionary principle to its ultimate level. none of us would get up in the morning. We would not even stay in bed, however, because that might harm us also. The reality is it is impossible to guard 100% against something that might happen.

The other big bugbear relating to all of this in the context of small developments and, particularly, where public infrastructure is concerned, is the cumulative effect. Something needs to be done. Perhaps if it concerned private homes, there could be another and another but it is very foolish for the State to keep saying that there might be a cumulative effect in the case of some facility or whatever that is needed for the greater public good. I guarantee that TII will not build the second road to which I refer through the middle of Connemara and the SAC. We will be lucky to get the first one built. This idea of a cumulative effect is nonsense. When it comes to public infrastructure, we need to differentiate our approach from the one we take to private infrastructure. There is a fundamental principle in our Constitution which one keeps finding laid out in all of the provisions, particularly those relating to private property. When one has weighed everything up, all rights are subject to the exigencies of the common good. It is important we never lose sight of that.

We must impress on Europe that in employing these laws, it will get a much higher level of voluntary compliance if it recognises the need to see there are competing interests. I was talking to somebody recently about this principle and I said that we must preserve the ecology, the SAC and habitats but that we should measure the index of risk to this. One the other side, in the case of a public road that is badly needed, we should also have an index of the danger of a major fatal accident. We should determine how much we could reduce that risk with a minimum increase to the potential risk to the environment when the road is being built. One cannot say that ecology trumps human safety at all times. We should try to find the happiest medium, reduce the risk to the ecology as much as possible but, equally, reduce the risk to human life by accident on a defective road. This applies again and again across everything we do.

The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs has the competing interests of protecting something that is more valuable because it is more unique to Ireland than the natural heritage. There are natural heritage sites in other places in the world but other than very small populations in Scotland, there is no other country in the world that has native Gaelic-speaking populations. If it dies, it is truly dead as a community language everywhere in the world. One cannot be so absolute in the measure of a piece of ecology. Gaeltacht communities cannot be sustained without basic infrastructure. We will not hold our populations and we know of the massive decline in more rural areas. We have to have balance when making our ecological decisions.

The Minister has taken a very constructive route. She has opened up the possibility of looking at all of this. My only concern is that we cannot do the same thing to SACs that do not have a designated high value.

We will fully support the Bill. We will examine it carefully and table amendments. We absolutely support the principle behind the Bill. I hope it will resolve the issue of the turf cutters and that it will not open another box of problems. Perhaps it will not do so. It raises wider issues that people have been shy about debating for years. There is nothing absolute in human existence. There are competing ecological and cultural rights all the time. There is also the basic right of people to live in their communities. There is also the value of very old, indigenous communities.

As a Dublin 4 guy, one of the things that always struck me when I went to Connemara was the surnames. They tell us a lot about settlement patterns in Ireland. If I go into the area where I live, O'Malley and Ó Cadhain are the old Gaelic names that predominate in the Joyce Country. Then there are the newcomers - de Búrca, Seoige or Joyce, and Breathnach, or as we call them, the Welsh people. That is what they are. Most people pronounce it as Walsh but we always call them Welsh because Breathnach means a Welsh person. That is where they came from in the 13th century. Then there is Ó Cuív, which came in the 20th century. In those names, one sees they are not irrelevant communities. They are history. There has been 2,000 years of habitation. Our surnames came in the 11th century and tend to be Christian names with "Ó" or "Mac" before them. We can trace these communities back to the archaeology of the area. They are as much a part of the archaeology as the archaeology itself. The preservation of vibrant communities is hugely important. I hope the Minister's officials do not see this as an end but understand it is the first step in a much bigger process that needs to take place. We need to harmonise all the goods in our society and make sure no one good trumps another and that everything is balanced.

We face a challenge in Europe. I have talked to MEPs about this and they just shrug their shoulders, throw their hands in the air and say they cannot do anything. Europeans do not fully understand our settlement pattern or that people live cheek by jowl with some of the greatest ecology in the world.

I understand that many of the special areas of conservation, SACs, in the north of Sweden, Finland and other countries are far away from human habitation. That is far more common in Europe than in this country.

I will hand over to my colleague. I look forward to debating the specific proposals in the Bill on Committee Stage. However, as I said, I hope we will not view this in a narrow context but in the context of the much wider conversation we must have with landholders, farmers and communities to arrive at a far better balance than occurred in recent years.

See this speech in context