Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There has been much debate in these Houses in recent months concerning the Climate Action and Low-Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2020. Recently, on the far side of the globe, the world's most advanced recycling centre for construction waste opened in Sydney. This $100 million facility uses ballistic separators and optical sorting technology to process 7,000 tonnes of waste daily, including brick, concrete, timber and metal material, and approximately 90% of it is recycled.I mention this because all of that high-tech equipment in the world's largest recycling facility was built in the tiny Gaeltacht village of Ráth Cairn i gContae na Mí by engineering solutions firm, Turmec, and then shipped all the way to Australia. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of welcoming the Minister of State with responsibility for the Gaeltacht, Deputy Jack Chambers, to Ráth Cairn. He toured the plant and saw how this firm in a tiny Gaeltacht village produced this world-leading technology. In the context of what is needed to achieve our goals in climate change, is it not amazing that technology is being developed here in Ireland - in Ráth Cairn, County Meath - and people on the far side of the world are buying our products to achieve their recycling targets? They are pursuing this circular model that sees waste as a resource to be kept in circulation at the highest value for as long as possible. With the opening of the world's largest recycling facility in Australia, I pay tribute to the workers of Turmec in Ráth Cairn i gContae na Mí who engineered the technology that allowed that to happen.