Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Chairman asked me to comment. Is that a provocation? Looking at a programme of drainage in a cost-benefit analysis comes down to what we count as costs versus what we count as benefits. The reality is that if in ten years we price carbon at €100 per tonne, a hectare of land devoted to beef farming, for example, where margins are extremely low, would be tiny next to the €400 per hectare carbon impact. The issue is how to measure that and whether it factors into the costs and benefits that a farmer looks at, or, indeed, the policymaker. The difficulty we have is we are not looking at this in a sufficiently holistic way in order to take account of the carbon impacts as well. The logic is that we pay farmers to switch the use of their land and take a different view. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine should be taking a similar view when it assesses different schemes for support. If we just look at the very narrow silos I referred to earlier, we tend to become blind to those wider impacts.

That is why I strongly favour integrating the way we approach challenges like this into the sort of circular thinking that considers how to design the advantage and pay to make it happen. The reality is that in ten years, other sectors of the economy will be expending €1,000 per tonne for carbon abatement, which could be done very profitably by many in the rural communities and provide a huge alternative income source to them. We must be imaginative in developing the instruments for that to happen. Those instruments are not proceeding as quickly as we are signing up to ambitions. We must devote more to getting those financial and economics people into the room with the likes of Dr. Lynn in order to design those policies rather than having them sitting in the Departments of Finance or Agriculture, Food and the Marine, or wherever they are.