Mr. Mauro Petriccione:

That happened in six months. I refer to the spatial distribution of territory. It is very clear that, perhaps unwittingly, we have encouraged commuting to an extent which has become unhealthy for many of our cities and urban areas. What can we do about this? It is not going to be solved at national level. It is going to be solved at the local and regional levels.

I refer to energy production. We will not replace the current totally centralised production model and totally diffused consumption model with a clean model which is otherwise identical.

We are not going to move to a total diffusion of energy production, but we must move towards a more balanced model of energy production. We will continue to have large production facilities, but will also have point-to-point production and consumption. That will also happen at a local level. When I meet mayors or regional administrators, recurring questions are what policies can we put in place and what support can we receive for local renewables, which is not the same as the mass renewable project we used to consider. If a forestry model is acceptable to Ireland, it is Ireland's choice. The Common Agricultural Policy is capable of supporting it, but it needs to be greened significantly. We have thus far tried to do this, but what we have done is not sufficient. The legal instruments are already in place in the regulation, not least in what the Commission has proposed in the new multi-annual framework for the period 2021 to 2027, inclusive, but it will also require much more co-operation among member states with the institutions and farmers to develop new and better models. It is not a uniquely Irish problem; it is found almost throughout Europe. We need to find a way to have better agricultural practices, better management of commercial forests and better preservation of primary forest cover, which, at least in certain parts of Europe, remains sizeable.

I may have misspoken earlier, but I was referring to economically marginal agricultural land, that is, land which is cultivated with food and commercial crops. In some parts of Europe the economic yield from that cultivation is marginal. Converting that land to be used for biomass could be a rational proposition for farmers. I was not speaking about wetlands. Wetland conservation is a primary objective of the European Union.