Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----who are promoting this Bill. It is important that we do something practical now for the mushroom industry. I have known about this from another aspect of my life, which I will not go into. We have known for more than three years that this crisis was coming but nobody stood up to say they were going to deal with it and save the mushroom industry. There is no point in coming in here and saying we need research into a different medium for growing mushrooms at this point because the industry will be wiped out while people in Teagasc try to work out whether gorse needles or something else can be ground up to produce a medium. There is no point in doing that kind of thing. We now have to have some derogation simply to produce extracted peat or mined peat, if you want to use that phrase, to supply that industry while we work on an alternative.

I hope the Ministers in the various Departments, as it is a cross-departmental issue, are working on some kind of measure, which this Bill is trying to get at, that will keep the show on the road for all those people who are about to lose their jobs. You can be in Friends of the Irish Environment and say your credentials are ultra perfect, that you stopped this and stopped that and you can make very obvious points about the science of it, which I accept completely, that peat is a hugely important carbon storage medium but in the end, let us be honest with ourselves, something has to give on this. By way of example, when I was on the energy committee in the last Dáil, the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, was on it with me, and a Bill was put forward by Deputy Bríd Smith to stop all gas exploration. I remember saying, "Hold it, we will need gas for the next 30 years." The response was that we were going to have alternative means of producing energy, we did not need it and we must stop gas exploration now. That was the imperative. It is easy to pose on these issues. The Minister, Deputy Ryan, went to the Cabinet today, I think, to say we need two need gas stations, and will need them for the next 20 or 30 years as a backup. I do not understand how it made sense to give up gas exploration in those circumstances and to render ourselves liable to Mr. Putin turning off the tap or gas prices shooting up in England.

The reason I mention that is that you can be as environmentalist as you like, but you must be truthful and practical and look at the consequence of what you are suggesting. When Friends of the Irish Environment go to court to seek this or that declaration, it should say what its plan is for the mushroom industry in Monaghan for the next five years.A ban on exports of peat to the UK is no problem as far as I am concerned, but I am concerned about the people who are working in and running one of the most successful export businesses in this country. They are entitled to the assistance of their legislators. They are entitled to the backing of their Government and, from those who have a different view of where the balance should lie environmentally, they are entitled to fairness and some degree of hope. I ask the Minister of State, who I know is a reasonable man - I have personal experience of that - to accept that the mushroom industry is walking into a crisis if we do not act now. Something must happen. If not this Bill, which will be talked out today rather than voted on, something must happen. Something must give. Something must be put on the table to keep the mushroom industry going over the next three to five years while other things happen.