Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister whose visits I always enjoy. I hope his message is well received. He is a very reasonable man. He has made the offers to recloate and has mentioned the bogs where relocation is possible and the 15 tonnes of turf to be delivered. That is a reasonable offer which should be accepted and negotiations should take place. I welcome all he has done in that regard.

Part of the trouble is that Europeans esteem our bogs more than we did traditionally. I recall reading a Dutch book which expressed bewilderment at how lowly many people in Ireland regarded bogs as they see them as a precious landscape. They regret having drained out so many of the polders in the Netherlands. They esteem this highly. We are part of the European Union and we must accept there will be people there who esteem those landscapes, the environment, the natural habitats and so on, somewhat more than we used to. There was a section in that Dutch book which said that the Irish thought so little of bogs that to call a person a bogman was meant as an insult. It was not meant as a compliment that he was a great environmentalist.

I recall some TV coverage where David Bellamy was in a bog in the midlands where he eulogised his surroundings. It certainly opened my eyes to it. This is a wonderful piece of environment, a wonderful habitat and the European Union, in the interests of the community of a whole, has asked us not to destroy them. In a sense one can see that. In a cutaway bog we have tried to see what we could do with it. It is a sort of a lunar landscape and productivity falls very rapidly on it and we are trying to transfer it to a heavily subsidised agricultural sector. Perhaps we should follow the Dutch in realising there is an important function of bogs and that draining them out for burning purposes, as we had been doing, is not the best use of that wonderful part of our landscape.

Peat was an emergency fuel during the Emergency and people such as the late Todd Andrews derived much kudos from the use of it. It is not an industry that has a long term future. All extraction industries come to an end. The Minister and his advisers will have the figures but it takes tens of thousands of years before a bog will reform. As it is a highly uncompetitive fuel, some of the economics of it may be questionable. The public service obligation payment to the ESB to burn turf in the period 2001 to 2002 is €92.1 million, therefore it adds to the bills of everybody who purchases electricity. It is a form almost of open-cast mining. The solution the Minister has proposed is that with the co-operation and involvement of Bord na Móna, a well-regarded company, people talk to Bord na Móna and move to those bogs and continue to ply their trade. I welcome the fact that Bord na Móna has diversified away from turf and has developed many other businesses,which is to its credit, because it recognises the Irish peat bog is a diminishing resource.

I hope those who are still holding out would talk to the Minister. They may find with their local knowledge they could move to the Bord na Móna bogs. It is a contradiction that the Minister, Deputy Deenihan is asking people not to cut turf whereas the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resource is subsidising the ESB to the tune of €92.1 million to harvest turf to turn into electricity at high costs. That is an issue for another day.

In environmental terms, the bogs are very important to the European Union and are very highly regarded on the European mainland. That is the reason their politicians have been such strong supporters of the policy being pursued by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. We on this side of the House recognise the wider importance of bogs and can see alternative development with the input of the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Varadkar, the Minister of State, Deputy Ring, and the tourism bodies.

The use of turf from these bogs as a fuel is a high cost option and the Minister, Deputy Deenihan, is offering the turf cutters other alternatives. As he said, he is delivering free fuel and offering compensation as well as giving them the option to cut turf on Bord na Móna bogs for the remainder of their working careers. Europe has asked us to stop extracting turf from certain bogs. I can see the reason that it does so, because in countries where they did not stop the extraction of peat, they regret the loss of that habitat.