Peter Cleere (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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986. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if he will consider setting up a grant scheme to help landowners with the costs of cutting roadside hedges, as a health and safety measure. [49220/25]

Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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Section 70 of the Roads Act 1993 sets out the responsibility of landowners to take all reasonable steps to ensure that trees, hedges and other vegetation growing on their land are not, or could not become, a danger to people using a public road or interfere with the safe use of a public road or the maintenance of a public road. This responsibility includes 'the preservation, felling, cutting, lopping, trimming or removal of such tree, shrub, hedge or other vegetation' in question.

The implementation of the legislation and the management of hedge cutting operations is a matter for local authorities and landowners, and I am not in a position to introduce such a grant scheme.