Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Sinn Féin will be supporting the Bill, as we did with the Private Member's Bills of then Senator, now MEP, Grace O’Sullivan and Deputy Sean Sherlock. The passing of this Bill today will be in no small part due to Grace O’Sullivan, MEP, in particular and I believe without her efforts and the efforts of Ed Davitt, her assistant, this Bill might not have happened.

I am reminded of the debate we had on Senator Grace O’Sullivan’s Bill at this time three years ago. Fianna Fáil stated it opposed the Bill in favour of bringing its own legislation in a matter of weeks, which never happened. The Government introduced and passed a motion to stall the Bill’s progress for entirely cynical reasons, suggesting that we must await EU law, namely, the marine strategy framework directive and other domestic legislation. All the while, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden have all legislated to ban microbeads prior to the directive.

It is a lesson, though probably not one we will learn from. It is a lesson that when the Government has the option of working with Members to progress their Bills, rather than stalling their efforts and wasting our valuable Private Members' time, engaging with Members in a constructive fashion on the Bills they have proposed is probably best practice. We do not have a lot of Private Members' time and we could have hundreds more Private Members' slots in this Chamber if we wanted to. On my own legislation focusing on young people, we could not get support for the lowering of the voting age to 16 in local and European elections, and I wonder why. That Bill was once delayed for a year and then voted against when we brought it back.I believe we could have hundreds more Private Members' business slots available to Members and better Government engagement with the proposals.

Regardless of all of that I welcome this long-overdue Bill. Prohibition of microbeads and microplastics is crucial to upholding our biodiversity. With depleting fish stocks it is crucial that we take this measure along with many other measures in response to climate change.

Countless scientific studies prove that fish have been found to be feeding on prey-sized plastics and end up consuming the plastic in preference to zooplankton. This has a knock-on effect for carnivorous fish, which ingest plastic-filled smaller fish. This was reflected on the Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government when the committee discussed the Bill. Dr. Róisín Nash from Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology told the committee that low levels of mircoplastics had been found in the intestinal tracts of fish from Irish coastlines. A study by the Ryan Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway, revealed how pervasive the problem is. A total of 73% of deep-water fish studied had microbeads or microplastics in their bodies.

The World Wide Fund for Nature commissioned a survey earlier this year which found that a typical human may be ingesting the equivalent of a credit card of microplastics every week. No major health risks have been found yet from this ingestion. However, fish that ingest microplastics are in our oceans and on our plates and that causes a health risk. Ocean levels and fish stocks uphold the biodiversity in our oceans and help in combatting pollution.

I am keen to see stronger action across the board from Government on this issue. We should not have to wait three years for minor prohibitions to be made. That is what happened with this proposal. We simply do not have the time. This crisis is urgent.