On this Money Resolution for the provision of money for the development of turf, I should like to direct the attention of the House to certain facts that appear to me never to have been discussed adequately in this House.
In December, 1921, a report was published on peat by a Commission of Inquiry into the Resources of Ireland. The report was signed by the late Professor Hugh Ryan, who was chairman of the commission, by Joseph Connolly, Thomas Dillon, Maurice Moore, J.P. O'Shea, Roger Sweetman, Robert N. Tweedy and Henry Walsh. The late Mr. Darrell Figgis was the secretary. At, paragraph 107, on page 31 of that report, the attention of the Oireachtas is directed to the following facts:—
"Apart from the use of peat for generating and power, its use has occasionally been proposed for a great variety of purposes. It has been employed for the manufacture of paper, clothes, carpets, antiseptic bandages. It has been converted intoa roofing and building material for houses, into a thermal insulator for ice stores, into a sound damper for telephone boxes, into a packing material for vegetables, fruit, eggs, fish and manures. It has been used for the filtration of oils, and for the manufacture of foodstuff (peat molassine meal). A brown pigment has been got from it, and, finally, attempts have been made to prepare from it a tanning solution similar to that got from brown coal."
Now, over and above that, at an earlier stage, this same report states that peat has been used, and was being used, for the generation of power in the form of pulverised peat in the 19th century. What puzzles me a little about all this is that, listening to much of what the Minister for Industry and Commerce has said to us, you would imagine that the procedures for using pulverised turf were of relatively recent development and that the available information about the processes employed was hard to come by. According to this report, these operations have been going on for close on 55 years.
Is it not queer that, when you go down to the Library of Oireachtas Éireann to inform yourself of the research work that has ensued on these operations 55 years ago, and search the index of the Oireachtas Library, there is not a single reference in the Oireachtas Library to turf? There is one reference to peat—which is the report from which I have just now been reading an extract. Surely there must be a very large volume of subsequent information available arising out of the user of turf for these various purposes since they were first initiated, and surely that information ought to be gathered for the information of the Oireachtas and made available to those who are interested in the matter for perusal in some readily accessible form?
There is one user of turf which strikes me as being one that would be and, I assume, has been investigated, but which I have never heard discussed here, and that is the gasification of turf. I know that in America they think nothing of piping methane gas, deriveddirectly from the soil, thousands of miles and, quite commonly, hundreds of miles. I observe that the gasification of turf for the immediate vicinity of a bog not only makes gas for stationary engines available but also provides a fairly wide range of by-products that could be further processed into very useful commodities for sale here or abroad. The reason I am consternated that these things have not more fully been ventilated here is that it suggests itself to me that possibly further work on these kinds of operations has revealed that it is impracticable—but it does not seem from this report that, in our circumstances, the gasification of turf could be deemed to be impracticable. I should be interested to hear from the Minister whether any active project on these lines is being pursued. If there is, might I appeal to him, instead of erecting a gas plant as big as the White City, to establish a pilot unit where whatever procedure we think most likely to succeed could be tried out and amended and adjusted before an immense capital investment of a permanent character is undertaken?
In paragraph 22 of this report—and it is to be borne in mind that this report is now 30 years old—it is stated that, in the judgment of this commission—and it was a very good commission—the most efficient method of developing power from peat is that of the producer and gas engine.
I should like if the Minister could conveniently tell us whether he has studied the 19th recommendation of this report, which is dealt with in further detail in paragraph 315.
