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

Mr. Donnellan has misunderstood my point. I have no intention of telling farmers because they know the land better than anyone and they are business people and have to make business decisions, taking into account everything that is happening. I think we need a land-use strategy plan to shape the policies that give farmers the payments and the signals for what we want done. For example, the need for this would be influenced by what seems to me to be one of the best ways we can get beyond 2030. While much of the forestry we have done already will account for the mitigation we do between now and 2030, we need to be thinking in terms of post 2030. The best analysis I have read from Teagasc in the recent report on showing the 27 emissions, was toward the end of the report where it states we need in the region of 20,000 ha per annum of afforestation to meet our future targets. That matches the analysis that I would have done in terms of the scale of ambition in forestry. We know that in counties such as Leitrim and Roscommon and elsewhere, we are not going to be able to tell people to set 20,000 ha of Sitka Spruce monoculture, which would have implications for the soil and so on. My sense of a national land-use plan is that we would know how much might we get in agriforestry in a land-use plan to help people to decide. Similarly, I recognise that the country is very different. Having talked to people such as Dr. Rogier Schulte for many years, I am aware that what is happening in the north and west of the county regarding soil, climate, the nature of farming and the nature of farms is totally different from what is happening in the Golden Vale. A land-use plan would assist in laying the policy determination of how we would pay the farmers in the north west, instead of leaving the farmers in the west and north to compete with the farmer in the Golden Vale, as if all the land was the same and the market will sort it out. The benefit of a national land-use plan is that it can pay farmers for protecting biodiversity, managing water, for training young farmers, for storing carbon and so on. One leaves it up to the farmer how to do it but to give them the signal, one needs a land-use plan to know what the signals are.