Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Indeed, I forgot about that. If the Minister is actually saying this is the justification for this, how will anybody control it?

I come back to the point about the provision on cutting, grubbing and destroying being a nationwide operation as section 8(2) stands. There is not the mechanism, machinery, resources or capacity on the part of any wildlife agency or conservation body to do anything effective to stop widespread cutting of hedges in August once an order is made under this regulation.Nobody will be able to police any regulations effectively. I do not see why we have not been shown the draft regulation. We pass referendums and we see the draft Bill. The child adoption Bill was put before the people, the abortion Bill was put before the people, divorce legislation was put before the people in draft, various pieces of legislation are put before the people on occasions so they could work out what they were actually voting for. On this occasion no attempt has been made to produce a draft regulation which has the limiting factor such as tillage and land management and this season's growth, all of these issues are just absent from the legislation. It occurs to me that if this season's growth is to be a genuine criterion, there is absolutely no reason it should not be mentioned in the legislation in respect of off-road hedge cutting. I presume the Minister would tell me before we go much further that she would accept an amendment on Report Stage to do that. If she is not willing to say that, and put it in the legislation that it is intended to have that minor effect, there is no point in making a speech justifying it in this House by reference to something she is not willing to commit to in legislation.

Likewise, if it is required for the purposes of reasonable land management, what do we mean by that? If it is to be in a tillage context, let us see what is actually meant by all of that. What I am coming down to is this - that the amendment proposed is effectively putting in place a standstill until some scientific basis for a change in this area is established on scientific grounds. That is the precautionary principle that we are supposed to follow in environmental matters. It worries me that this seems to be a very unscientific, broad-brush approach and one which gives a free licence to all farmers to attack any hedge. Even if the Minister took out grubbing and destroying, as long as there is something left at the end of the operation the possibility of proving that any particular landowner had infringed the legislation would be very small indeed as would the the chance of enforcing it.

Lastly, I do not want to reignite the controversy that we saw some moments ago. This is not a question of the townies versus the farmers. This is not about idealists. Some of us are very conversant with rural Ireland, and know what it is like when a bramble grows out of a ditch and it forces bikes out into the road and such like. No one needs to have a particular background to know what growth occurs and what the road safety implications can be of roadside hedges growing out onto the road in summer. By the same token, although some people may get hotheaded on social media and use broad-brush language about this particular proposal, the Minister should not underestimate the feeling that there is on this issue. It is not just that The Irish Times wrote an editorial on this and praised this House for querying what the Minister is doing. There is a huge amount of people in Ireland who object to this, they object to its unscientific basis, the manner in which it has been done, the absence of draft regulations, the unthought-out way that this has been done; they object to what they suspect is just a deal done with farmers' organisations and that it why it is being pushed forward with such vehemence. We live in a very uncertain world but I do believe that if by any chance the Minister manages to progress this into legislation she should bear in mind that this Government has a lot of problems - we only have to look around at what has been happening in the last week - and this is going to alienate a very significant area of votes from it. They are not just people who sit on beanbags thinking about San Francisco in the 1960s