Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is critical that we protect and provide what is needed for our horticultural industry. Part of the future for Irish agriculture is more diversity and a significantly enhanced and expanded horticultural industry. In that regard, they need growing medium compost. My colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, has set up a working group to look at future alternatives to that. The reality is the future will not be in the mass industrial extraction of peat from our bogs. Those bogs need to be protected as a store of carbon and as a source of biodiversity. There will be a variety of alternatives, such as the short-term use of very small bogs here and also the use of imported peat. In reality, we have been probably one of the biggest exporters of significant volumes until recently when legal challenges stopped the extraction and exportation. I believe that will be one of the solutions that we need to protect our horticultural industry in the short run. The medium-term solution has to be the development of alternative compost mediums.

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