Paul Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. I want to tease out a few things in our guests' submissions a little bit further and to do a compare and contrast exercise with both BirdWatch Ireland and An Taisce, in particular, with regard to the birds and the shallow tillage. We will start with that one. I get what BirdWatch is saying. I am a farmer and when I was younger we were making some tillage and I know the advantages of the stubble ground afterwards, the spilled grain, and whatever. What evidence has An Taisce got where it mentioned that there are areas which are predominantly tillage where there are nitrates problems as much, or even more so, than with dairy activity? Does An Taisce see an advantage to the shallow cultivation to mitigate that problem? We are all interested in not just water quality here but biodiversity as a whole. If An Taisce sees the merits in the shallow cultivation, how does it square the circle which has arisen from a biodiversity and a bird point of view? How does one mitigate the nitrogen leakage without the shallow cultivation? What is plan B if we are to leave the seed and the stubble for the birds?