Mr. Michael Davoren:

With regard to Deputy Ó Cuív's question, we had subsistence farming in Ireland up to the 1970s and then we joined the EEC which became the EU.

We were subsidised to increase our numbers and then we went into the quota systems. Then as the quota systems were capped, we introduced SACs and we froze the Burren in time. We had very divisive debates and the farmers of the Burren, like every other place in the west, were fighting like tigers with Dúchas as it was then. Dúchas won out, SACs were put in place, the land was frozen in time and we had a list of what could not be done. Dúchas decided there would be a 20% reduction in stocking level; there would be no sheep and no herbicide or scrub cut. That was what was imposed on us. Against that background, the Burren farmers decided it was better to light a candle than curse the dark. We sat down with Teagasc. Mr. Michael McGrath was the regional manager in Clare and was a native of the Burren. He put it to us that we should look to academia to back our argument that what we were saying was right, that the farming prescription was wrong and we needed to change it but could not change it without academia. While I do not say this in a critical way, even today everybody looks to the academics for the answers to the questions. However, the academics looked to us, the farmers in the Burren, and that was the secret to the success.

Mr. Joe O'Mahony was the dean of the faculty of agriculture in UCD at the time and we applied for a student to carry out a PhD on the impact of farming on the flora of the Burren. The student was Dr. Brendan Dunford and the rest of history. His study earned him a PhD and the book was called Farming for Conservation in the Burren. Anybody wanting to know how and why the Burren exists should read that book. Some 5,000 years of farming created it and 5,000 years of farming managed it. In my opinion as a farmer, it is not possible to destroy the Burren - it is indestructible because if it could be destroyed it would have been destroyed but it cannot. It will fix itself provided it is given the help. The secret to this project's success is that the Burren farmers, along with representatives of the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, sat down around the table as a steering committee and drew up the terms of reference for this project to start with. The farmers of the Burren borrowed £100,000 to redevelop an old school that was falling into dereliction to create office space for the team in order to have them in our midst instead of in the county town, Ennis.

Each farmer must employ a farmer at his own expense to draw up the plan. Here is my plan on a single page. That is my total commitment to this. If I want to draw down the funding I decide what scrub I will cut - it is marked on the map. I have to go out and cut it and treat it. My planner will check to see that I have done the work - that is in phase 2 of the work. I should start by outlining why I am doing this. One particular field had a score of 3 and I brought it up to a score of 8 by cutting the scrub, putting water into it and feeding meal instead of silage. I have a vested interest in grazing this winterage properly because it is a product that delivers me money. The product is retailed to the tourism industry which recoups the money seven times over through the tourists coming to the Burren by managing it properly. That is the success of the project to me as a farmer.

I brought my 36-page REPS plan because it is an obvious question. My AEOS plan has 32 pages. There is one page in this and it delivers and can be measured. It is not possible to measure what REPS did. REPS was a good scheme in its own right and the first two did great work after which it went off kilter a little, but that is for another day. This project works for one reason only. For me species-rich grassland is the corn of the south; it is the beef of Leinster and it is the milk of Munster. This produces more income per hectare for me than livestock does, but I need to farm it with those cattle to get the money. In the past we raised cattle to earn a living. Now we raise cattle to produce a pristine environment, which gives me a living.

That is the kernel of the problem. That is why it will succeed elsewhere. The farmers involved in Wicklow, Connemara and elsewhere need to decide with the environmentalists. The environmentalists will state what we need to protect and the farmers will decide how it can be protected. I know this because for 4,500 years the farmers protected it by accident. They produced livestock to live and the environment was the by-product. Today, the environment is the product and the cattle are the by-product. I may have gone off kilter a bit.