Mr. Ruaidhrí O'Boyle:

In 2017, in a one-sided bilateral conversation, the climate committee of An Taisce sent a series of letters to Teagasc on concerns we had about its environmental pronouncements. People have been addressing the marginal abatement cost curve as a roadmap for agriculture. It was first published in 2011 or 2012 and looked at the Food Harvest 2020 plan. It was on the basis that emissions would increase by 7% from 2011 to 2020 and that the measures published could offset almost all of the increase in emissions. As of the end of 2020, based on the provisional 2020 numbers, instead of increasing by 7%, emissions increased by 15%. These abatement measures have been spoken about for eight or nine years but they are clearly not having the impact that was expected. We have been in touch with Teagasc. We have written to it but received no response. In 2019, we published the letters but we have not had engagement.

On misdirected investment, the example given is investing in peat-burning power stations when we already knew what was needed to be done with the peat because we speak about sequestration and the biggest carbon storage in the soil in Ireland by a large margin is in our peatlands. We knew, and we have known for decades, that we need to address our mining of the peat out of the ground. We have not done so. We now have Bord na Móna scrambling to do something. Environmental organisations are being blamed for stopping Bord na Móna from doing its work whereas, in reality, environmental organisations have been calling this out for years and nothing was done to plan for it. With regard to misdirected investments, we have to question anything invested in increasing the emission profile of any sector on the basis we are planning to reduce our emissions by 7% on average in this decade. People cannot say why anyone would be led to believe they should invest in such a thing but civil society does not see it as a worthwhile investment at this point given that we have to cut our emissions.