Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for arriving late. I had a question in the Dáil. My understanding is that a lot of this is around change of land use. The officials will correct me if I am wrong. There is a kind of worldwide lobby suggesting that if I take Rwanda out of producing food and put it to producing energy, there will be people starving in the Horn of Africa. We had the Famine in Ireland because of potato failure but there was an awful lot of other food produced that people could not get. Famines then and now are caused by political decisions rather than a lack of food. I think most people would agree with that. I do not believe the logic works through.

What the officials are really saying is that the problem is profitability for farmers to produce the grain to make the bioethanol. It is not profitable enough compared with traditional farm methods. Is there a possibility of using more marginal land for different crops which could produce the goods we require? Would that require incentivisation? In my part of the world there are an awful lot of trees being planted through forestry and there is no work for people in the community. We wait 40 years for the trees to grow, they are thinned after ten years and then it is another seven or eight years before they are thinned again. It all happens by machine and there is no need for people. If there was a crop that was reducing our greenhouse gases and solving those problems while involving an element of labour, that would certainly be a positive. I would like the officials to tease that out a little bit.

I was interested in the point about growing grass very well if we are growing it. I presume the reference was to using biodigesters to produce gas from the grass. I would like to understand more about the profitability of that. How would it fix the problem of work? With slurry, we have deadlines. We cannot get it out on the land when the land is too wet, and we have run into huge problems there. I do not think we have any biodigesters in the country compared with other places around the world where biodigestion is used more to take care of that problem. Our climate seems to be getting wetter and wetter and the problem of getting the slurry out is continuous. Is there a possibility of killing two birds with the one stone and resolving this issue by using the grass which we produce very well while being able to pay the farmer a reasonable price for it?