Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I might be but I would stand up for the Citizens' Assembly. I think it was a brilliant exercise and I agree with his analysis. If we are not doing that, another proposal that could be followed, if we are to benefit from being more efficient than others, is that we should look, perhaps, at moving agriculture into the European emissions trading scheme, ETS, which would give us a measure of efficiency compared with other producers.

We mention Brazil and that we cannot deal with Brazil because Brazil is not going to handle the issue. The truth is that Brazil will have to do something. The Paris Agreement applies to every country in the world. I do not believe America will stay out of it. It would be a complete pariah if it did. At some stage, it will come back in. Brazil is in it and it has a similar problem with land use emissions. It will have to address the issue in its beef industry. We are not alone in this. On the matter of our size, people say that we are only small. The way that this climate response is going is that it gives everyone an opportunity to take part in the solution, which is a better system.

On the scale, we should cotton on to land use, land-use change and forestry, LULUCF, and carbon sequestration. Even stopping peat production and the big power plants would mean that 5 million tonnes per annum of emissions from peat could be saved almost immediately. Doing the devil and all in grass management, we might get 1 million tonnes of carbon abatement or carbon reduction. This has to be looked at. We have to bring forestry, bogs, land use and agriculture together. It is not the farming sector on its own. It is an integrated issue. I think, above anything else, that we need a national land use plan that goes from the mountaintops to the sea, looks at what we are good at with farming and other areas, and where we really concentrate on biodiversity, natural parkland, forestation, a new type of forestation and what type of farming we do.