Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will turn to organics. There is a problem. Ms Duggan spoke of 20,000 ha of trees every year. Being realistic, we are allowed plant 4,500, is it, or was it 2,500 trees per ha last year? We should take an holistic view of this. There is an opportunity which I have spoken of many times. Just think that there are 130,000 farmers in Ireland. Each single farm payment application is something around 32 ha. One thousand trees is an acre, generally. There are bigger farmers and smaller ones. I am just averaging it out. If you could get one of those farmers to put in 1,000 trees in the next few years, would we not achieve 130,000 acres of trees that would do an awful lot of good? That is about 45,000 or 50,000 ha of a win that we could have between now and the end of CAP. We should encourage the farmers. I am not saying you put them all together. You could put them down by a ditch so that a farmer would not interfere with them, as it were, and sow them in different places that would help biodiversity without inhibiting a small farmer. That is one scheme. The eco-scheme, in my opinion, will help a lot under the new CAP. It is low-hanging fruit in my opinion that we can get. Anyone thinking we can plant 20,000 ha of trees for the next 15 years would have to start making more land.

I was listening to Mr. Kelly on the phone after the voting. I will call it straight because I do not believe in beating around the bush. Mr. Kelly should think about the farmers around this country who went down with stone shores years ago on small farms and, with spades, shored it or gravel tunnelled it. There are dairy cows in Kerry and a lot of the west is shored land. Mr. Kelly knows the terrain probably as well as I do. To tell those farmers they will rewet the land would be like a red rag to a bull. Anyone who comes out with that should know it will not wash. There is a saying in the countryside: bad land is like trying to tame a wild duck. It is hard done. If you tell a farmer with 30 or 50 acres that the piece down the end of the field that they have been all their life working on, that they have put blood, sweat and tears into, that they are going to let the land go back into the wild after they have been fighting with it all their lives to keep it right, it is not a runner. I will be honest. We need to look at other solutions.

I thank everyone for coming in. There was tree planting under AEOS and under the old REPS scheme. Under the eco-scheme I think 4% has to be done for biodiversity to qualify for CAP.