Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our witnesses and thank them for their informative dissertation. Anecdotally, about ten years ago, my household was totally dependent on oil for home heating. We bought a wood-burning stove which cost €1,500 and changed over to that. We reduced our home heating cost by something like 60%. I think that is a good achievement in a short time for a relatively reasonable investment but, as Deputy Lahart said earlier, not everybody can raise that themselves and they need help.

I strongly support the growth of wind energy. I know that people will always say that we should have wind turbines offshore. In other words, they would be out of sight and out of mind where we do not have to see them. I do not understand why we have that position in this country. People do not seem to have any problem with them in other countries and live in the middle of them and so on.

The problem that I see in this country is the agrifood sector and the extent to which it is likely to be impacted. It is the one sector which held up after the economic crash and stood its ground in delivering to the economy. Interference in that has to be reduced to a minimum. People talk loosely about cutting the national herd by 10% and so on but that will not work. It will not work because it will not be accepted by the industry and the farming community, which knows full well how to be green insofar as their enterprise is concerned.

Here are my comments, for what they are worth. We can use more electric cars. I travel about 45,000 km per annum. The experts will say that it is not safe to invest in an electric car because of the limited range and that much time will be spent charging it.

The agrifood sector can do a great deal of carbon sequestration but it is not encouraged to do it. People always say that it can be done but then somebody else comes along to say that it cannot. In another committee yesterday, somebody said that wood-burning is all right but it emits particulates which are dangerous from the point of view of respiratory illnesses and so on. He said that all wood-burning should stop. If we want to sell something, we should improve the situation before we start telling people to stop everything. There is no gain at all for the country and the economy if we slow everything down. This needs to be understood. The size of our economy has doubled since the 1980s. There are twice as many people in work now as there were in the 1980s, regardless of Covid. Covid may be with us for a while but we have to think beyond that. The population of the country has more than doubled since the 1950s. That has not affected other countries and economies as much.

The agrifood sector effectively, sustainably and efficiently produces food. It is better at it than any other country in the world.

We are a leader in the area of sustainability, milk from grass, beef from grass and so on. Nobody else can compete with that. We produce enough food to feed almost 50 million people. No other country across the globe that I am aware of does that without damaging the environment around it, such as the large-scale deforestation taking place in Latin America and so on. I am a supporter of alternative energy and the green agenda but as long as we create obstacles as we go along, we will not get the kind of support that is needed to achieve the success that is needed without damaging our economy.

I am not asking any questions. The Chair will be glad to know I am only making a comment. I live in a constituency that is a big agrifood producer. Before somebody says I have to say that because it is where my support base is, I would point out that it is not. The majority of my support base is in urban areas. We have to look at the ability of an economy to deliver and meet sustainability guidelines at the same time.

We can do that but we need help, understanding and for people to say that we can grow more trees, for example. Incidentally, I am an amateur tree enthusiast. If we want to, we can grow spruce trees and do a great deal of carbon sequestration. They do four times what is done by native and deciduous species, yet everybody says we must plant native and deciduous species. Why contradict the situation before it gets off the ground at all? If we are going to be serious about this then let us identify to what extent the agrifood sector can get involved in carbon sequestration, such as growing trees in corners of fields, for example. A certain number of trees will sequester a certain amount of carbon. We should make it understandable and easy for people to take on board what they can do in order to make a contribution and to what extent it will make a major contribution.

I want to be supportive of the move to reliance on sustainable energy and the reduction of emissions and it is possible. However, if the agenda is to scrap the industry we have in order to achieve that then it will not work, there will be no support for it and there will be considerable agitation, plus the fact that we will not achieve what needs to be achieved in the time available.

Those are my meanderings. I have lots more to impart at some later stage but I will simply say that we can and need to progress. We need to do it quickly, effectively, efficiently and sustainably. There is a notion nowadays that we can live without high-protein food but we cannot do so and we cannot live without food either. A large portion of the world's population is on the edge of starvation all the time so we have to produce food and it has to be made available. As the population of the world grows, we have to make more food available in a sustainable way. There are many challenges that we can overcome but we will not do so if we turn on ourselves and decide that we can abolish part of our economy in order to achieve a target. If we do so, soon after that our dependability will be on forces outside of our control and we will have to buy our food from different areas.