Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests. I have a few comments of my own and then I will close this session.

I strongly advise against going down the compensation route. This must be resisted. The compensation route is definitely a port of last resort. I have seen it before with designated land. We were promised good schemes for that land when it was designated and the funding dried up very quickly. As well as that, the capital value of the land has been completely destroyed. It probably has less than 20% of the capital value of undesignated land. It baffled me how it was allowed to happen at the time.

As a committee this is the second session we have had on this. An awful lot of questions have been raised in this meeting. We are all fairly ignorant of where this process is at and what we need to do to put the brakes on it and get a bit of common sense to prevail. The secretariat here will take away from what we have heard at the last two sessions. We will try to find out exactly where it is in the EU process, what exactly our Government's position is and where the decision-making is at as well. There is an onus on us in the Government parties to ensure we get accurate information to this committee quickly. As I said at the outset, we intend to devote a number of sessions to this. These proposed regulations from Brussels could have huge implications not just for rural Ireland but for our whole economy and we as a committee intend to put a lot of effort into getting a defence of Ireland's position put in place to ensure common sense prevails. We have seen it with the war in Ukraine and food security, and also with forestry security. We had a forestry briefing this morning. There is huge competition as it is for land for forestry. If this goes ahead as proposed, we can forget about the forestry industry in this country. It will be over. That is leaving aside the arable land they will be trying to foreclose on.

Our guests will be in this room again discussing these proposals. I thank them for their participation this evening. It was a very worthwhile discussion and it has briefed us well on where the farming organisations are coming from. I will now suspend the meeting to allow our guests to leave and then we will commence our second session.