Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There are two different issues, namely, the blanket bog and the raised bog. I will address the former first. If I remember correctly, quite a large area of blanket bog is designated SAC or NHA. The level of turf cutting that takes place in the blanket bog does not have the same knock-on effect across the bog that the cutting of raised bog does because it tends to be much shallower and the drainage system tends to be different. Will the witnesses confirm that?

What percentage of the total preserve blanket bog is domestic cutting of blanket bog? As I recall, domestic turf cutting accounted for approximately 4% of the national total, while commercial cutting was approximately 96% of the volume cut in 1997 when we started. Of blanket bog, how much is currently active turbary? I have a suspicion that it will be relatively small.

On the threats to the blanket bog, destocking was mentioned. Some of the officials present might remember the initial destocking in 1997 or 1998. We had the courage to take on what was not a popular issue. I learnt one of my first lessons in irrationality in that process and why it is hard to make matters move forward. The Government at the time, along with the Department, decided that the quickest way of doing a rapid destocking before we measured every bog was to take 30% of everybody's income and get on with the job immediately because Europe was putting the pressure on.

I remember an extraordinary visit to Europe that taught me the danger of people making a principle out of practicalities. We said the Government was willing to compensate farmers through Exchequer funding for the loss of income. I thought we would be told that was great and fine but instead we were told that we could not do it because it would reward the polluter. Under the polluter pays principle, the polluter cannot be paid. I said it would be our money and that we were not seeking any EU money because we were willing to pay the farmers. We could not take 30% of farmers' incomes and say it did not matter. It was their livelihood.

While we paid them, it took seven years for the Department to get permission from Europe. I did not give a damn. As far as I was concerned, I was not going to take the bread out of the mouths of farmers up and down the west coast. The agenda always seems to be that we want people to take the pain, but do not want to compensate them for it. If ecologists want to know why their agenda is not working and why they meet resistance on the ground, the practical explanation is that if professionals in Dublin were told 30% of their income had to go for the greater good, there would be a fair few thousand people at the door of Leinster House. In this case, it was clear-cut. We were paying. We were not asking Europe to pay.

There is a second issue with destocking sheep. It is an argument I have had time and time again with the Department and others. People who are knowledgeable about sheep agree with me that Europe caused overstocking in the first place through the headage payment. That is a simple and absolute fact. The EU said it would pay for every ewe a farmer had even if it never had a lamb. What could one expect farmers to do but to put more and more ewes on the hills? If one distorts the market, one will get a distortion. When the EU went to destocking, it left the person who knew the individual hill out of the reckoning, namely the farmer who had been doing it right in most cases until the ewe premium came in. How to farm those hills in a sustainable way was still within their knowledge. They had been doing it for generations until the market was completely distorted. We brought in a lot of people who were not used to hills but who were agricultural planners and gave them the job of deciding in some empirical way how many sheep a hill could sustain. Departmental officials know that I have always believed that the complexity of the way sheep roam the hills was not taken into account.

It would be interesting to examine bogs to find out whether I am right or wrong on the next issue that arose. Farmers on the hills, certainly in Galway and Mayo, were encouraged greatly to engage in supplementary feeding of ewe lambs and ewes in winter. One of the problems with that is that one could keep more ewes on the hill. Another problem arose. From a very young age, ewes got used to be being fed. I do not know if anyone here has a cat, but we have one at home. Our cat does the odd bit of roaming around the area, but it will always sit on the window sill when I get up. The cat is cute and it knows that if it sits on the sill for long enough, I will get up for my breakfast and give it a tin of food at the back door. Luckily, the window sill is not going to wear away. If one does the same thing with sheep, they will congregate on the lower, softer or boggy peatlands where the food is given out. Hey presto, despite the fact that one has destocked the hill, a significant damage is done on those peatlands. It has nothing to do with stocking levels, but is the result of something farmers were told was good farming practice. Tradition did not do that. Farmers loved the hill and ensured it handled what it could. Certain grasses that die in winter on a hill determined stocking levels in the old days. This needs complicated, farmer-involved answers.

That brings us to the next matter, which is State policy. At another committee, a major issue arose during the week which was well reported, notwithstanding that I did not seek any publicity. We go on with platitudes about high-nature farming and the value of the ecology, hills, NHAs and so on. Many hills where sheep are present are NHAs, SACs or SPAs. I have no problem with that. I have a problem, however, if officials will only pay the single farm payment, basic payment scheme and greening based on production, which is to say the number of sheep a farmer can keep, while cutting that number. The officials discount as economic value completely the high-nature value of the peculiar manner in which these farmers must farm to keep a sensitive ecology in balance. If farmers fail to do that, they will destroy what we have there. Until we realise that a Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine refusing payments for high-nature farming is undermining the NPWS and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, there will be resistance on the ground. Joined-up thinking is needed. Not only that, there will be land abandonment and depopulation. Unless we get all of those ducks in a row, it will always appear to be a them-versus-us scenario.

One my last acts as Minister was to organise a meeting in Galway to say that if we were going to have all of these designations in the west, we needed to get all of the environmental organisations down to tell us how to make a few bob out of them. We were told those designations were so important that all the people wanted to come and look at the areas involved. I wanted to know how to get alternative employment for the people whose bread was being taken out of their mouths. People need a livelihood. This debate often ignores the fact that the main custodians of all of this are the people on the ground who must also live. There are simple remedies, but the big vested interests in Ireland do not want to apply them because their attitude is that if a farmer is on bad land, he or she should do it for the cause. If a farmer is anywhere else in the country, he or she should get paid for doing it for the cause.

The Chairman has been indulgent, but I want to make one comment on blanket bogs. I had an aunt who was an ecologist and botanist 50 years ago. She warned then that the midland bogs were in danger. When Síle de Valera designated the bogs in 1997 or 1998, we took a lot of major commercial operators out and approached Bord na Móna to say there was more to be done. We must recognise that Bord na Móna has moved forward and we need to keep working away. The same principle arises. There is a population there with a right to jobs and livelihoods. If someone takes one crust of bread out of their mouths, he or she must show me where another crust of equal value, if not more value, is to be found. It need not be in the same type of industry. One thing I regret, albeit it was not in my constituency, was the mistake the community made in respect of the inevitable closure of the sugar factory in Tuam. It tried to hang onto to the sugar company whereas if the community had looked to their children and the education they were getting, they would have insisted on getting a Government office for the town with 400 jobs. Their kids were much more likely to work in a Government office than on the production line in a sugar company. It should not be thought that we can walk out of the midlands, leaving it as a black hole. All one has to ask is why Offaly has won hurling and football all-Irelands. There was a population there to do it because, simply, of Bord na Móna.