Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I know the area well. There is also the question of the land there. There is tension in the debate around climate change and those bachelor farmers - they are not all bachelor farmers - with bullocks on the side of a hill often get all the blame. These suckler farmers are seen as the worst offenders when it comes to climate change but they are not. We will need cattle grazing some of that land because some of it is peaty wetland with poor soil. If we let it go, we would see a range of birch, ash, holly and others draining the peatlands. Some of that type of land and peaty soil has value in the storage of carbon.

The Deputy is right in saying the current EU Common Agricultural Policy system is saying farmers must improve land and get rid of wetlands and hedges. They cannot have underutilised land. The opposite is what is required, and we must start paying our farmers for the natural services they can provide by maintaining some of that marginal land, including grazing it. That would lead us to managing those peaty soils in the best and most efficient way possible.

I am convinced the sort of co-operatives we have in west Cork are good at this marketing. If we really start to pay farmers and we measure or monitor those peaty and marginal soils, there should be a premium for the cattle or sheep grazing it. They would be part of a climate solution rather than a climate problem. That is what we must do right across the country. We must adjust to paying farmers for managing and protecting water quality, the storage of carbon and the restoration of diversity. It should not just be about food production. That is where the Common Agricultural Policy is going and where an additional €1.5 billion of the carbon tax revenue will go in the next decade.

We need to go further and get other systems for paying. We need a new generation of young people to take on those roles managing our land and looking after it, particularly with the more marginal soils and areas where, traditionally, it was not a first focus. It should and will be with many of the new funding mechanisms we will try to introduce.