Maire Devine (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I second the proposal by my colleague, Senator Gavan, to amend the Order of Business.

Every week, we find out more about the destruction of our environment. We now have something that happened recently, which has been spoken about by two other Senators. Yesterday, the State was fined €5 million by the European Court of Justice and faces daily fines of €15,000 until compliance with environmental legislation is met. I am not sure when the €15,000 daily fines will start. Perhaps we can get an idea. This is because of the failure by the State to comply with EU legislation that could have prevented the awful landslide at the Derrybrien wind farm in Galway and the killing of 50,000 fish in the surrounding region. The State consistently ignored previous rulings of the European Court of Justice. There was a landslide of tons of peat when peat and forest were removed to a depth of 5.5 m to develop the wind turbines.Imagine the removal of that amount of peat and forestry. It would never happen today.

Are there plans to change legislation governing planning permission and to introduce more stringent rules to ensure adherence to environmental policies? We heard today that hundreds of thousands of kilogrammes of potent greenhouse gases had been leaking from the Moneypoint plant for quite some time, yet the ESB, a semi-State body, did not see fit to inform the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA. The EPA is now considering enforcement action. The gases in question have a global warming potential 23,000 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Will the Minister update us on both issues, but overall on policy, planning and oversight by the EPA, which disgracefully was not informed about the Moneypoint plant issue?