Ian Marshall (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for being slightly late to this meeting as earlier I had to attend a meeting in Belfast on the environment, climate change and agriculture, which are issues pertinent to this conversation.

A managed transition is referenced a number of times in the documents presented by the company and it is critically important. We have a tendency in the agricultural sector to focus on concerns and not the opportunities whereas other industries tend to focus on opportunities and not concerns. We must deal with that.

I wish to refer to Bord na Móna's full life cycle calculations. When we consider carbon capture, carbon sequestration, which has been mentioned by other members, the rewetting of the bogs and their potential to create opportunities, and the full life cycle, are the full environmental impact and benefits of biomass importation being considered? A colleague of mine grows asparagus in the south of England. The factory that processes his produce and the supermarket that sells it are located close to him. Shockingly, the asparagus that he imports from Peru has a lower carbon footprint than that he grows in the south of England simply because the kilogrammes of dry matter that he grows in Peru is three times the volume he can grow in England. Has sufficient work been done on the full life cycle calculations in some of these areas? In other parts of the agricultural sector, in particular, we have been good at doing such calculations. Sadly, we look a pretty disreputable bunch of people when compared with other industries that do not produce life cycle calculations.