Martin Browne (Tipperary, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is a nursery in Dundrum in my constituency where the owner cares for 1 million CO2 absorbing plants a year, and I am sure the working group will hear similar stories. He told me yesterday he was glad he has only ten more years in the business when the people who should be looking after it have no interest in it. He has had to source horticultural peat from Scotland and Estonia, and costs have risen from €24 per cu. m to €37, and there are also the emissions involved in importing it. It is like the forestry sector. How do we expect to attract new entrants into this market, which is valuable in terms of carbon sequestration, when the sector has been left to wither? Are we going to become a country that is a net importer of horticultural peat or, instead, are we going to import mushrooms and reverse the situation in which our mushroom industry employs more than 3,000 people and exports more than 80% of its products to the UK?

This is how the future looks for the mushroom sector which, if the current policy persists, may very well move to the Continent altogether. We must be realistic. The harvesting of horticultural peat is so minuscule.

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