Mr. Ian Lumley:

The common agreement must be in alignment with the Paris Agreement, the European Green Deal and the European biodiversity strategy. Perhaps we can deal with this in later questions, as this is covered extensively in both An Taisce's submission and the coalition's submission from all the organisations. Teagasc published the Ag Climatise document, which provided for continued herd increase but it was projected the greenhouse gas emissions impact of that would be mitigated by a number of means, including carbon sequestration, all of which was untested and not properly quantified. We find it strange and odd that people in the agricultural sector are constantly saying we can continue the current model but there is an enormous opportunity to offset that carbon through sequestration or different grassland management of hedgerows or forestry. The people advancing that argument are not talking about the carbon loss that is happening through land burning, soil erosion or the drainage of high peaty soil land. People think of bogs in terms of peatland but 20% of the land area beyond that has peaty soils. I do not want to bamboozle the members with statistics but a good statistic is that 20% of the land area has 75% of the organic soil carbon. That is not only bogs and peatlands but the midlands and the upland areas have very rich peaty soils and we should be protecting those. We need an exit to peat extraction. It has been very disappointing. We met representatives of Bord Bia ten years ago and pointed out that they were giving the Origin Green logo to compost that was coming from peat and asked them why were they not promoting and supporting alternatives? I note Senator Boylan is at the meeting and she was promoting community composting in the Ballymun area. The EPA published a report a decade ago on how the Ballymun community composting model should be rolled out nationally but support was never given to that. The research and resources were simply not put into developing peat alternatives or putting Monaghan mushrooms as an alternative. I also find-----