Paul Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Callanan, Mr. Moore and Ms Fay for their presence and for a comprehensive submission, which was very interesting and broad-reaching. I have a couple of brief questions.

The first is based on almost the entirety of the Department's submission. Can the witnesses be any more explicit on timelines, for instance, when we will be able to do individual farm inventories? The committee has had a couple of meetings on this and we are all aware of the issue in forestry at the moment. I do not want that to dominate the meeting. When is forestry most advantageous? At what stage of its maturity does it sequester the most carbon? Given that we are now slipping behind in our afforestation and planting, when will that affect us most if we have been sowing 8,000 ha annually in recent years? When would the greatest advantage and the greatest effect of that be seen?

As for ownership of the carbon, while Mr. Callanan says the State has now said it does not own it but has to include it in its national inventory, he does not specifically go as far as saying the landowner or individual farmer or the person who planted the forest owns it or will have access to it. Does Mr. Callanan see coming the day when individual farmers will be able to trade carbon credits, will have ownership and will be able to reap the benefits of whatever sequestration is on their farm and, one would hope, balance their sequestration against their emissions by becoming more efficient?

As for the woodland environmental fund, I like the scheme whereby private businesses invest, but is there a view that, down the line, those businesses may have some claim over the carbon credits and be in a position to use them to balance against their emissions in whatever their business is?

Finally, I have a question for Ms Fay. On the bioenergy side, are we working towards anaerobic digestion and, if so, how far away from it are we? We all know the advantages of anaerobic digestion. Energy aside, the big advantage of it that I see is that, where slurry is used, it is a far cleaner way of spreading the by-product of the slurry. There are, however, a lot of anaerobic digesters in the North which are being fed a lot of grass. How do the emissions from the grass used in an anaerobic digester fare? Do they result in a net gain from the point of view of carbon emissions or are there a lot of emissions from repeatedly harvesting the grass and using it in the anaerobic digester?