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

I am sorry, I had to go the Chamber for a Topical Issue debate. I welcome the witnesses and thank them for their contributions. I read most of the submissions earlier. I have a couple of brief points because I know most of the questions have already been asked.

One thing that strikes me is that farming in Ireland has become more intensive. The intensification of farming has brought us down a particular route and has certainly made food cheaper for the consumer. However, a lot of that farming is based on inputs, many of which are imported from various parts of the world. That is linked to some of the other issues we have. We have often had people from the tillage sector before the committee telling us how they are struggling to survive and how tillage in Ireland has practically been wiped out. They cannot compete with the cheap products that are coming in from abroad. That is having a very negative effect on our greenhouse gas emissions, yet tillage is a very good carbon sink.

As I was leaving, Dr. Matthew Crowe was talking about forestry. I live in Leitrim and forestry is a big issue there. We have huge tracts of almost 100% Sitka spruce forest, which grow and then are cut down completely to grow again and be cut down completely again. There is an issue around all of that. We need to find a better model of afforestation, which creates continuous cover so there is continuous segregation of carbon. It is very much a profit-driven enterprise rather than being something that is there for the farmer to try and make some money from. There is a big resistance to it in the farming community for many sensible reasons.

I am sure slurry and slurry storage have come up. Our answers to the problems we had in the past around the Water Framework Directive focused mainly on sewage and what was happening with our towns' sewage systems, one-off housing and all of that. We avoided the issue of agricultural slurry by giving farmers very good grants to store the slurry. Slurry can only be stored for so long, however, and then it has to go out on the land. The climate has changed and part of what we have been dealing with in the past years are increasingly wet summers running into the harvest. It ends up that the land is often saturated and cannot take the slurry. Something we do not have in Ireland that is used in many countries is biodigestion. What can we do in that regard and how is it moving forward?

On renewable energy, should we be looking at supporting farmers to erect solar panels and other systems in order to negate the carbon that is being produced by farming? Deputy Danny Healy-Rae has left but he mentioned a couple of things of which we also need to be cognisant. Big multinational and global corporations produce the vast majority of the problems we have, yet the emphasis is put on the little guy when it comes to solving them. That needs to be borne in mind. Deputy Danny Healy-Rae also said that everything is going towards modernisation, which increasingly means becoming a throw-away society. He had a point there, out of all that he said. We need to look at that. We know it in our own households. If I buy a washing machine and it breaks down after five years, the guy who comes to look at it will say, "Ah, we cannot fix them anymore. You will have to throw it out and buy a new one." That is part of the logic that has come in.

I thank the witnesses and apologise that I was not here earlier.