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

I thank the Cathaoirleach for the promotion. I thank the witnesses for the presentation.

On one level, I am quite frustrated in that it sounds like an awful lot more research will be done before any of the models they are talking about can be delivered. Given the sense of urgency, the best is the enemy of the good. I suppose my question is: can we start straightaway? Are there shadow prices in biodiversity that we could make a stab at what a piece of land, that was managed in a way that is different from today, would generate in terms of gains? I accept we were told with peatlands rewetting that anything from 1 tonne to 10 tonnes could be saved and no one could price it, and everyone threw their hands in the air and nothing really emerged. Can the State take the risk in getting it wrong but set up a a set of rewards, and if, in five years, we find it is wrong, the State takes the hit and we end up paying some farmers more than they ought to have got for what they did?

We need to move on this. The allied question is how close is ACRES and all those pricing regimes to being something we could go much wider with. The problem, as I understand it, is we just do not have the bandwidth to get enough involvement at the moment.

I used to be an economist. If the yield is between €8 and €38 and the cost is €1, there is immense room for rewarding people and paying for the mistakes we made, if those numbers stack up.

We will have Department of Finance officials in later on. They are pointing to the EU taxonomy, the new climate and nature fund, the 10% for biodiversity objectives in the EU’s funding programme and their own investment and lending schemes and how they are prioritising green projects. If the witnesses were here with the finance officials, what would they say to them? How close are those objectives to being the way we should go? If they are not, can we change the way the EU taxonomy works and change the shadow prices? I think the shadow price of carbon is €100 a tonne. Can we have a shadow price of water purity or something?

I think the witnesses are trying to approach this from finding prices, which seem to be very uncertain, and then leveraging both private and public investment because there is a big return. Is it not more productive in the short term to talk about targets? I understand that in the south east there are some commercial people looking at the river basins – the Nore, the Suir and the Barrow – and saying “These are polluted. Let us make that the target and let us orchestrate the people around it.” Therefore, there is a channel for public money and we know exactly what we want to do. We can measure the water as we go along. Is that not a better way than this hoping we leverage a whole revolutionary system that will change the way people make decisions? It seems the other one is a little bit more tangible. We could find the worst river basins, get cracking on them and channel our funds into that.