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

I thank Mr. Kennedy for the submission and, as usual, for helping us. I was out at the Devenish place and learned a lot. There are a few things that need to be grasped in this. A lot of people think that they are carbon neutral within the city and that the only people who can solve a lot of this are the farmers. This is the first thing that people need to realise, that from the minute they open their eyes in the morning in the city there is nothing they can do about it, and we are not blaming them, but it is others who have to try to offset their problematic experience, be it sewage which I spoke about earlier, and where it goes, be it the sludge from water or be it the electricity that is generated and all of that. Every single bit of it is done in the countryside. An appreciation first of all should come for the farmer communities who are willing to put their shoulders to the wheel to offset not alone the own situations but also for those who are living in the urban areas are not able to do anything about it.

When we were out with Devenish the mixed species grasses were going well. Has more research come in on them? At the time, Mr. Kennedy had said Devenish was doing research on the length of time they would last. There was also a question mark, which I saw in one of the farming magazines, whereby some farmers believed that the butterfat might be down a bit. Is there any research on the likes of that?

When Mr. Kennedy was before the committee previously, he mentioned that we need the LiDAR system to count what we have and count where we are going. I believe the Office of Public Works is starting something in that regard this year. At the time, Mr. Kennedy mentioned that a certain number of square metres would be needed in each photograph to ensure that it was right. Will Mr. Kennedy remind us of that because we as a committee will probably write on that.

Does Devenish do anything on the different crops? We see now where the likes of wheat is problematic. Does Devenish do research on part of that for the farming community? It was interesting to hear Mr. Kennedy's analysis on carbon and that the farming community, as I believe myself, needs to have the benefit of their own farm and that somebody else is not whipping carbon credits away from them. I am aware that there is some research done on forestry in that regard. At the moment we are in a situation where more forestry is being cut than grown. The State can talk all it likes about the situation but the problem is that we have had a dysfunctional Department for a number of years that has let this deteriorate. The heart is gone out of it. If one mentions forestry now to farmers they run away because the paperwork is a mile long. At the moment if farmers want to apply for a forestry licence it is all about the environmental impact assessment appropriate assessments and screening out. It is all EU bureaucracy that is now coming in. We have seen this in turloughs and farmers are seeing it day by day. Is EU bureaucracy destroying a lot of this? It is actually banging back against resolving some of the climate issues and farmers have walked about away from it with the stuff that is there.