Grace O'Sullivan (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister is aware, a licence has been issued for the mechanical harvesting of sea kelp in Bantry Bay in County Cork. The licence will cover 1,860 acres of native kelp forest. It was not advertised adequately within the local community and contains no requirement for an environmental impact assessment. I would like to state for the record that I am not at all opposed in principle to the sustainable harvesting of seaweed - in fact, I previously applied for a licence for a small-scale operation. Seaweed is a fantastic natural and renewable resource with multiple uses in agriculture, food, medicine, energy and so on. Fostering the farming and harvesting of ocean resources in a sustainable way is instrumental to the new green economy that will be essential to Ireland as it moves into a post-carbon future.

This licence, however, is an example of how to stop that process dead in its tracks. There are a number of central issues with the agreement between BioAtlantis, the licensee, and the Department. The public consultation has been woefully inadequate. There has only been one public advertisement of the application in the Southern Star newspaper in December 2009, which did not mention the large size of the area under consideration, the mechanical nature of the harvesting or the indigenous nature of the kelp forest in question. Neither Cork County Council nor its western division, which covers the Bantry Bay area, was consulted on the plans. There seems to have been an almost deliberate exclusion of the Bantry Bay Coastal Zone Charter group, an EU-funded organisation designed to protect the bay from exactly such inappropriate developments.

The second issue is the scope of the operation planned. The 1,860 acres are quite massive, the equivalent of cutting down 38% of Killarney National Park.The Minister of State at the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Damien English, clarified in the Dáil that the extraction will work on the principle of rotation, but that still means a massive area of the bay will be facing mechanical harvesting in any single period. As a test case this level of harvesting can hardly be considered a conservative approach.

Third, the nature of the harvesting is a grave concern for two reasons. I have already mentioned the mechanical harvesting but I am almost more concerned to learn of the way in which the cutting is to be conducted, namely, the cutting of the stipes of the kelp so fast to the holdfast. Best practice recommendations from the Ryan Institute on environmental, marine and energy research for the harvesting of seaweed states that individual plants should be left with 20 cm of the blade above the stipe to ensure the fast re-growth of the plant and that fertile plants should be left alone as much as possible. This is not what is proposed in the authorised agreement.

Finally, there is grave concern about the potential impact this level of extraction and its methodology would have on the ecology and habitat of Bantry Bay. Bantry Bay is an iconic and complex ecosystem and the kelp plays an essential part in it. It is the home for juvenile lobster and shrimp, a part of the life cycle of sea bass and correspondingly a key resource for species high up in the food chain, birds such as the chough and fulmar and mammals such as the iconic harbour seal. These in turn support various industries, notably the fishing and tourism sectors which are so essential to an area that was badly hit by the recession and only now is getting back on its feet.

The community of Bantry Bay is not taking this lying down. A public petition has been shared extensively and has secured over 4,400 signatures to date. Cork County Council has asked for consultation with the licensee about aspects of the deal and public meetings are planned for later this week. In fact, last night there was another public meeting in the area organised by Coastwatch Ireland and others, which discussed the importance of the bay in terms of local tourism, ecology and fisheries. At the meeting local voices raised concern about the effect large scale kelp removal could have on wave patterns in the bay and the effects on tourism, including diving, kayaking and angling which are now making a return since the recession. Concerns were expressed about the potential future colonisation of invasive species such as Japanese seaweed, which has the potential to move into areas left vacant by over-harvesting. There was a shared anger at the way the licence has been granted and a frustration that local people are not being heeded and that the local democratic structures are being undermined.

There have been nice sounds this week from both of the Fine Gael leadership candidates in their manifestos about protecting and cherishing the environment. While we do not have enough data at present to make recommendations on sustainable levels of seaweed harvesting, it is alarming that the Government could consider an area of this magnitude as an appropriate test bed. This is the same approach we saw the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Deputy Heather Humphreys, take with the heritage Bill - cut now, worry later. This is National Biodiversity Week, yet once again Fine Gael is taking an approach to the environment that is dangerously cavalier.

I have already stated that neither I nor my party is opposed to sustainable seaweed harvesting, but the approach we are seeing with regard to the community and the licence is unacceptable. We ask the Minister to reconsider the licence and to take into account the concerns of the community of Bantry.