Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Yes. I am talking about just transition. I ask the Minister, very clearly, where is the justness and fairness in this process. I have heard him say we will create green jobs instead of brown jobs but that is probably the biggest load of balderdash and nonsense. How can the Minister seriously sit there and think the Irish people will take this on board and let it wash? It is wrong.

The Minister speaks about rewetting the great bogs of Allen, where people worked or slaved, staying in tents in encampments, working day and night to drain them. With one swoop of the Green Party biro, the Minister has consigned them to being rewetted. That act is a sin. I have heard the Minister talking about holding carbon in the ground but how can he ask us to take that suggestion seriously when we are still importing these goods from overseas for sale here without a problem? At the same time, the Minister wants to gently get to the stage where he will stop farmers and other individuals from having the right to cut turf.

The Minister is not yet strong enough to do it. He has Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael where he wants them because he can keep them in power so long as he stays in his position. He will be able to railroad his way through the Irish people. The Green Party has a minute mandate, although I respect it very much. It is a very small mandate when compared with the enormity of the Minister's actions. The number of people who gave the Minister and his Green Party colleagues a number one vote is small, although I respect everybody who voted for the party. It is democracy at work. We can consider the influence of the Minister in the Government. How can he stand over his actions and sleep at night? I do not know.

The Minister is being very cocky in not accepting any of the amendments. He would not even listen to the debate on them. These amendments will be gone through one by one. We will go through the Bill line by line. I am very proud of my colleagues in the Rural Independent Group under Deputy Mattie McGrath who have worked diligently on this like everybody else who tabled amendments. I am only speaking about our group and what we are trying to do.

We are standing up for farmers, fishermen and people in the rural countryside. The Minister spoke about timelines and I asked a question about it.

I am very conscious that I am speaking to the amendment because it is about transition and how we go from here to there. It is about the fairness of it. I cannot understand how the Minister can stand over some of the measures being proposed, even in the period to 2030, including the suggestion that slurry spreading and such farming practices be carried out by 100% renewable resources, in other words, an electric tractor. I have information for the Minister. We do not yet have such a thing in Ireland and we do not yet have a battery operated tractor in Europe that would be powerful enough to pull 2,000 or 3,000 gallons of slurry out of a yard and spread it outside in a field. I must inform the Minister that there is no such thing.

Where is the fairness or the just transition in this? Does the Minister realise that in the last months Ireland has come dangerously close to-----

See this speech in context