Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Sinn Féin will be supporting this legislation. While most of those involved in the issue of raised bogs and turf cutting would be broadly supportive of what the Habitats Directive is trying to achieve in terms of environmental protection, the implementation by previous Governments resulted in the disputes that we saw in recent years.

The Habitats directive specified that considerations must be given to the social and cultural impact that a designation of special areas of conservation, SACs, may bring. When the Habitats Directive was transposed in 1998, it seemed there was little or no consultation with turf cutters and those who relied on that fuel.

Furthermore, the basis of designating raised bogs in this case was to protect natural boglands. However, commercial turf cutting in the previous decades has devastated those boglands. It was those who cut turf for personal use who were more diligent in their management of the bogs. At appropriate times, they have engaged in re-wetting to ensure the bogs are not damaged in a way comparable to that done by commercial milling.

I draw attention, as I believe the Minister has also done, to the recent regulations signed off by the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Bruton, which have put in place a new regulatory regime for commercial peat operators to exempt them from the requirement to obtain planning permission for areas of more than 30 ha where previously it was 50 ha. The new regime will be subject to an Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, licensing scheme. However, the change can be interpreted to offer a free pass to unauthorised operators to continue extracting peat without planning permission or environmental controls until at least mid-2021.

While I welcome the Bill, it seems the Government is proposing one policy of sustainable turf cutting with today's legislation while endorsing an unsustainable model by the actions of the Ministers, Deputies Eoghan Murphy and Bruton, that has and will destroy far more bogs in a short period of time than traditional turf cutters have done over centuries.

Uncontrolled peat extraction can contaminate drinking water, kill fish and destroy the habitats of rare animals and plants. Every measure that will have a detrimental impact on the environment should not be conducted under the guise of statutory instruments. The Minister might inform us if she supports these regulations.

In the intervening years since the Habitats Directive and the SAC designation, the boglands have been left to emit carbon and damage the environment, which completely goes against the objectives of their designation as a SAC. The turf cutters warned of that at the time. In retrospect, if the Governments had taken policies of collaboration rather than imposition we would most likely have reduced the carbon emissions in that period.

Successive Governments' negligence has led to an unwarranted scepticism of SACs and the habitats directive. While there are many cases in which those views might be valid, it was not the objectives of the directive or the SACs that were at fault. It was the lack of engagement from successive Governments which hid behind excuses that they were being directed to do so by Europe, which was not the case, and their failure to engage with turf cutters.

I commend the Department on taking a different strategy that has culminated in this Bill. I, too, reserve the right to submit amendments but I will leave it at that.