Mr. Seán McCabe:

I take the point. That is how I understand we tax people and pay for public services that help us grow as a country. That is my thinking.

I have two other points. On the question of agriculture, I take the points made by Deputies Canney and Durkan. Farmers feel as if they are not being listened to, and that relates to Deputy Canney's final question. They definitely do not feel their needs and priorities are being acted on. There are also very concerning dynamics, with farmers taking on massive levels of debt to lock themselves into the current model, which is building larger parlours and sheds, renting or buying land. These are huge levels of debt and because there is no cash flow through the farm and farmers are doing all the work themselves. They cannot afford to pay for labour and they are doing longer days and working harder than ever before. It is unsustainable on a human level, aside from the economic level. We must really interrogate that.

We must also interrogate the consumer side, as consumers must shop in multiples that offer goods for nothing because they work two jobs on minimum wage just to get by. We can solve both sides of that equation by giving people real opportunities to shop locally and buy local produce. I know this does not fit in with the larger dairy model we have kind of become wedded to in this country. There is room for both in the first instance and then we must consider what is very sustainable in the long run for the farming community.

On the just transition, what has not come up here at all is Bord na Móna. We cannot forget that there has been an effort of merit to enable the transition of the workers of Bord na Móna. It is a very serious matter. It is already too late to get on that but we really must ensure the just transition funding coming from Europe and us creates a transformative environment for the midlands.

On the sugar industry, I completely agree that co-ops are difficult now and absolutely laden. That is the enabling environment for them. That is a policy position. When we closed the co-operative dairies and abattoirs and moved everything to this hybrid plc model, we also changed the environment to better favour the hybrid plc model. We can go back and there is no problem creating that environment.

The Deputy's final point concerned funding. If I were in members' shoes, I would take €100 million per year and put it into nothing else but listening and allowing people to participate in a meaningful way, listening to farmers, fishermen and the people in rural communities who feel they have been left behind. I would do that every year with €100 million just to facilitate this dialogue.

Looking at a participation fund like that, there are 1,087 parishes in Ireland and I would this at that level. I would give every parish approximately €65,000 per year to fund a facilitator to help the community through this transition. That might sound like a lot but we are in a massive crisis. On the co-operative piece, we would need to put in more than €200 million into the process. Once communities have come up with their own solutions, how do we give them the resources to activate those solutions? The communities will come up with solutions. Any of us who have spent time in the community know their ingenuity. I am working on two projects right now, with one in Phibsborough in Dublin and one in Ardara in Donegal and we are trying to work with the community to unlock potential in the climate crisis and identify their own solutions.

We will get this to a stage where the community will have a costed plan and we need resources to flow in behind that. The solution is borrowing. There was mention of debt falling on our children and grandchildren but countries are not households so we should not view debt in the same way as we do household debt. There are two figures to bear in mind, which are the deficit and the denominator, which is the size of our economy. If we act the way we are talking about here and distribute opportunity across the country, our economy will grow rapidly and our debt, which is not, by and large, indexed to inflation, will stay the same size and what we repay will shrink relative to the size of our economy. We cannot think about debt as something that will somehow land on our children or grandchildren. What will land on our children and grandchildren is food insecurity, flooding and the potential of an entire societal breakdown as a result of the chaos the climate crisis could bring. We must act in a robust way now.

The final piece is critical as it must happen in the next three or four months. We have had the LEADER programme in Ireland and it was very successful. I could give some figures but they are in the document I sent to the committee. It has not been as successful in recent years, partly because the amount of money going to it has been reduced and there are some issues around the independence of local action groups etc. We will not go into that now.

LEADER has evolved in the European Union and it has become the community-led local development multifund approach. This means that rather than just coming through the Common Agricultural Policy, community-led local development funding can come through all the Structural Funds. As we negotiate our plans with the EU over the next six months to arrive at our plans for the next six years, we should insist that the money we take in from each of these funds, including the just transition fund, is ring-fenced for the bottom-up processes that are enabled by a LEADER-type approach. We can then work on improving a LEADER model. If we really want to unleash the potential of communities, that is absolutely critical and time sensitive. We must move on it soon.

I hope this goes some way to answering the Deputy's questions. There should be €100 million per year on participation and more than €200 million per year to enable the outcomes of that participation and co-operative approaches. We must also look at how community-led local development multifund approaches, if adopted in Ireland, could put resources at a community's disposal.