Mr. Andrew St. Ledger:

The examples to which I was referring are EU-funded pilot projects which are up and running. The farmers have formed local co-operatives and are managing the resource, not clear-felling. They are sustainably managing the hedgerows and the small pockets of woodland dotted around their farms. In Europe there is more of a tradition of integrated farming and forestry. We lost the forest culture here with the loss of our forests and with the historical events that occurred here, whereas in Europe they continue to understand that farming and forestry are linked. In eastern Europe, for instance, there is a system called shredding, whereby, come wintertime, they take the tops off the mature trees they have on the farms and dry them and that becomes fodder.

Coming back to food, in ancient Ireland, ash would have been a tree used for fodder. There are also references to cattle and pigs being fed on acorns in the Annals of the Four Masters. Again, farming and forestry in ancient Ireland were agroforestry. The cattle were grazing in among the mixed woodlands. This improved the quality of the butter and other dairy products. Tacitus, I think, in the first or second century described the wonderful Irish butter. The Romans were waiting for a shipment to come. We were exporting butter and it tasted wonderful. Why did it taste wonderful? The wild cattle, the woodland browsers, were like deer. The idea of just a field of grass, the monoculture, is not the natural origin of a cow. Our forestry model is like a guitar we are playing that has just one string. We are missing all the other strings. Instead of this one note we should have a symphony of benefits.

I ask the committee to look at hedgerow management. We have a Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine that wants to increase food production and wants more grass. There is in the same Department the forest service, which is charged with increasing our forest cover, and there is the one playing against the other because the Department was penalising farmers on the basic payments for removing scrub. Scrub is the first part of the forest coming back. Scrub is what is called a natural succession of species. Again, we have lost sight of this. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is having scrub removed. It is again a case of just grubbing it all out. One sees it piled up. I live in the hills of east Clare. One sees the farmers grubbing it out and no one getting any benefit from it.

It is heaped up and either allowed to rot down or burned. It is the same with hedgerows. A serious amount of biomass is involved. Let us consider the idea of using nets to collect what a farmer cuts. Somebody should be collecting it because it is embodied sun energy, even if it is only 1 cm in diameter.