Dáil debates

Wednesday, 14 July 2021

Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021: From the Seanad

 

8:52 pm

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

I will most certainly.

The Government is attacking our people in the name of protecting the climate. My goodness gracious me, but what it is doing is an absolute disgrace and I will rub the Government's nose in it again and remind it that it stopped us from making and selling peat briquettes in Ireland. The Government shut down our plants while telling us that it was fine for us to import briquettes from Germany and sell those German-made briquettes proudly. I continually spoke on behalf of the farming and forestry sectors and said that if that was what the Government was going to do, then it should put in place a system of carbon credits for our farmers. It did not do that. Belatedly, it underwent a conversion and decided it would do that. It did not do so when we wanted it to or when we tabled amendments asking it to. The Government is now adding such a system, although I am afraid it will not go far enough because it raises the question of who will actually get the credit. It is right and proper that if farmers have hedgerows and natural woodland on their farms or have planted forestry, they should get a credit for it. If the Government attacks people on the one hand for being bad for the environment, it should compliment, congratulate and pay those who are good for the environment on the other.

Every so often, the Minister tries to let on that he is in tune with farming and that he cares about the custodians of the environment.

The people who own the countryside are the real green people. They are not the fellas up on a bicycle today, letting on they are cycling with the ministerial cars driving around with their papers behind them. We are all sick of that old pandering. I know real green people, who were talking about wind energy 30 or 40 years and generating it. They were talking about hemp and all the uses that could be put to. They were real environmentalists and genuine people. They are not people who are on a crazy agenda like the Minister, who is hurting many more people than he is trying to help and who has total disregard for them.

The Minister's 12 months in government has been an absolute disgrace, when you look at the forestry sector and see how he has let it down. Has the Minister heard what these genuine people with forwarders have said? He would know a lot about a forwarder, that is, the machine that goes in to harvest the trees out of the forestry. They owe hundreds of thousands of euro in payments. It is hard enough-----

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.