Mr. Niall ? Brolch?in:

I will answer the last question first. Most experts say we should not give grants for new forestry on organic soils. In terms of existing forestry, therefore, I agree it makes sense to allow the trees to mature. That has to be balanced against potential emissions from peatlands and it is a question of people doing the maths on these things.

As for the question on the Common Agricultural Policy and who is doing the rewetting, Bord na Móna and Coillte are doing quite a lot, and there are many European projects that are doing quite a lot. Our university is involved in practical rewetting projects. The National Parks and Wildlife Service is also involved, and there is quite a bit of community rewetting going on. The demand for rewetting is quite clear.

People get the impression farmers are not in favour of this, but the number one point made in our care peat stakeholder survey was that there is no provision in place to assist farmers with funding. Indeed, it is not even about funding but about unlocking funding based on carbon credits. There has been a lot of talk about carbon farming, and in the UK they have put in place a policy called the peatland code that allows people to avail of this easily. Where does a farmer or a private landowner go or start if they want to do this work? Is there a framework in place? How can they get it? At the moment what is happening is that it is possible for people to set up carbon credit schemes but the verification is the key thing. As I said, one academic has described what is going on right now as the Wild West, because people are offering to sell carbon offsets and so on when there is not sufficient verification. If it cannot be verified, the danger in Ireland is if we allow this to continue, we will get a very bad reputation because we will be selling things that cannot be verified. I would urge this committee to take a handle on this because, as Deputy Bruton has pointed out, there is huge potential here and, as the Teagasc representatives have said, the opportunities in relation to carbon farming are coming down the road within a year. I believe carbon farming is a type of paludiculture. Paludiculture will be allowed for grants within the Common Agricultural Policy within the next year, so it will be an option for people to set up both sphagnum farms and carbon farms.

I want to give a quick view on the difference between a sphagnum farm and a carbon farm. Carbon farms just sell credits and make sure that growth of sphagnum and other types of peatland plants occurs and that it becomes a natural peatland. Their trade is basically inputting carbon in the ground. A sphagnum farm harvests a level of sphagnum sustainably and is highly lucrative as a farming method as it can be sold as a substitute for moss peat, as it were, and is potentially a type of fertiliser. That is actually practised in countries like Germany and they have made great progress on this. I recently visited a sphagnum farm in Germany and they were selling it when it was harvested for €16,000 per ha, which is an enormous amount of money. That is based on three to five years of growth. I understand that, in Ireland, we have better potential for sphagnum growth than in Germany. The issue is mechanising the harvesting and setting up the system to do that, so that needs to be supported. It is not the case that farmers have to develop all of this themselves. We need organisations like Teagasc to put in place facilities to do this.