Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the director for joining us and giving us some insight. However, I am somewhat disappointed by the level of detail given in the slides. DG Environment obviously has significant detail on which the presentation was based, so I had been hoping for more detail in it, but we are where we are. In fairness, the director and his colleagues are probably doing a reasonable job in trying to sell it in that he is telling us the directorate is not preaching to member states and it is up to each member to come forward with its own proposals that are legally binding. At the same time, as many members have told the director, this has caused a large amount of disquiet and anxiety.

I am conscious of time and I wish to home in on the section on drained peatland under agricultural use, because that primarily affects me. I come from Longford, where we have paid a massive price for just transition. We have seen the escalation and the fast-forwarding of decarbonisation in the midlands with the closure of a number of peat-fired power stations, the closure of commercial peat harvesting, and the loss of several hundred well-paying, significant jobs that were the bedrock of these communities for 50 years. Around that a nucleus of small farms has built up. These farms were in the main harvested out of the bogs. I am sure the directorate officials are familiar with the 1990 film "The Field" starring Richard Harris. This proposal or law is bringing hundreds of Richard Harrises to the fore because there are families who have spent generations building up this land and have cultivated it from bog. There are people farming the land who do not realise until they start looking at maps that their land has come from what was peatland and they are looking at a scenario where this is going to be rewetted. I acknowledge and commend the officials on saying we have gone some way down the road with rewetting in this country. Bord na Móna has ambitious plans for the decommissioning and rehabilitation of 30,000 ha of peatland across the country that was previously commercially farmed peatland. That is significant in itself.

To focus on Longford, at the moment we farm 73,000 ha of land. I had hoped the directorate's presentation would tell me specifically just how much of that land is to be considered drained peatland under agricultural use. The numbers are very startling: 30% of that land must be rewetted by 2030, 50% by 2040 and 70% by 2050. Even if we take it conservatively, a third or 40% of that 73,000 ha of current farmland is peatland. That is an enormous shift.

I will move to questions because I want to give the officials time to answer. I will home in on one of the points raised by Deputy Carthy on the socioeconomic implications of this. It is astonishing we would look at something like this at EU level without doing that. I echo what Deputy Fitzmaurice said about community. We are not just looking at rewetting peatland here. These are generational farms, as I said. Grandparents and great-grandparents started the cultivation and harvesting of what we know as traditional farmland out of what was peatland. Sons, daughters and whole communities grew up around them. I am aware the directorate says it is not about displacing people, but if we rewet John Murphy's land, it is almost inconceivable there are not going to be consequences for the adjacent houses in the area. We are already seeing it with the River Shannon, where we are struggling in some communities. We are buying out landowners because we cannot guarantee their lands are not going to flood. It is similar with the Bord na Móna scenario we have at the minute. Bord na Móna cannot, hand on heart, give genuine reassurance to many landowners about the implications of rewetting and exactly how it is going to impact their areas.

On the socioeconomic implications, the officials have said it is their view that, whatever they have done at this stage, they do not intend to do any more, but surely there must be some mechanism for a country like ours to give the scale of the implications of what DG Environment is proposing? If we look at Longford, I am aware of two secondary schools that were built on what was traditional peatland. If we were to follow through on the argument of this, those two schools are going to have to be rewetted. If we are going to rewet the schools, we are obviously coming within town boundaries. This will have huge implications for county development plans and where people live and work in rural Ireland.

In some respects, I probably agree with some of the spirit of what the directorate is trying to achieve here but sometimes it wants people to run and move too fast. My region is paying a huge price. We embrace the challenges we have with the climate targets, but we have had an escalation in decarbonisation. We have been brought forward ten years down that road. More than any region in Ireland, we have paid the price. I ask the officials to come back to me because I am not satisfied with the answer on the socioeconomic implications. In tandem with that, I ask them to give me some indication of the risk analysis the directorate has done. I imagine it has done some of that. Bord na Móna tells us it has done some planning and provision on what will happen with the 33,000 ha based on current rainfall, exceptional rainfall and the geographic changes that are going to come.

This is an obvious question, and I know the answer the officials are going to give me, but what if we decide to ignore the law? It will have huge cost implications for the country.

Those are my three questions. I ask the directorate to come back to me on the socioeconomic implications, what it has done in terms of risk analysis, and what happens if a country chooses to ignore the nature restoration law.