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

A lot of investment was put into the storage of slurry and now, perhaps because of climate change, the land is too wet to spread it and it is overflowing. This has been an issue for a long time and will be an issue into the future. If we continue getting the wet summers we have seen, with rain at the beginning of August and not stopping until after Christmas, we will not be able to keep storing slurry so there has to be some other method. We see biogas anaerobic digestion plants in many countries. Could they be part of a solution, with the agreement of the communities living near to where they are proposed?

There is a peat-burning station in Lanesborough and the ambition is to turn it into a biomass station and to import biomass from America for this purpose. That seems to be a flawed way of looking to the future. Surely we should be trying to do it some other way. Farmers are not going to start to grow biomass unless they know there is a market that pays them well for it. What are the witnesses' views on that?

On the question of afforestation, we have a lot of forestry in our part of the world, mainly Sitka spruce trees growing very fast on poorish land. This does things as regards carbon that are fine but it has a detrimental effect on communities and society. In most parts of Leitrim we have vast monocultural afforestation with one mass-produced type of tree which requires minimal related labour activity. It has a devastating effect on everything that happens in the community. Are there any alternatives? We have to be realistic as we will not be able to stop people doing what they want to do with their own land. If there are grants which promote this type of afforestation, that is the way people are going to go. Are there any other solutions, rather than promote a crop which is just left there for 40 years before anybody has to come back to cut it? There is no need for a human being to even look at these trees so is there anything which requires a bit of work, so that people can stay in the vicinity and communities can prosper from it? Foreign companies often are getting the benefit from this ultimately.

Deputy Cahill raised the big issue of how our beef was being produced and the number of bovines we have. We are a country that produces a lot of high-quality beef and a lot of milk and we do it very sustainably. Is there going to be pressure on us in the future to cut back? Will there be pressures to find alternatives? There are various schemes in place, such as the beef data genomics scheme, but will European directives put any pressure on us in this area? Is that the direction in which this is going?

It is very scary when we think about it. We could be in a position in maybe not so many years to come when people will say they used to produce beef in Ireland and trees in Latin America but now they produce beef in Latin America and trees in Ireland. It is a dangerous route. I thank the witnesses for their contributions.