Michelle Mulherin (Fine Gael)
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I have a number of questions. I am conscious that yesterday an NGO called Friends of the Irish Environment was given leave in the High Court to take an action against the State for perceived failure on our climate mitigation actions. This country is generally coming under criticism in this regard. The witnesses are of course appearing today before an agriculture committee. Obviously we value agriculture economically and we are very proud of the fact that we in Ireland farm in a carbon-efficient manner, which was the subject of discussion here. A certain proportion of our emissions is allocated to agriculture. To get the balance right, then, we have to be very active in developing other areas and in upping our game in these other sectors: electricity, transport, as we have been discussing here, heat, and energy efficiency. We have an abundance of renewable electricity sources. We have been talking about biofuels here today and it seems that we have so much available to us and that we just have to get the policies to match. I know that there are issues around cost and so forth.

People have mentioned biomass and forestry, which fall into the camps of both the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. I want to echo some of the points raised earlier by Deputy Martin Kenny. We in Mayo have a lot of forested land but most of the forestry currently owned by Coillte is being felled and then shipped down to Waterford. As a result we in Mayo get no value added to that product. I very much welcome the renewable heat incentive scheme, which is long overdue and can bring a new stimulus to the market. When it comes to many of the policies that we are trying to implement, we talk about creating a stimulus because the default position - fossil fuels, conventional generation etc. - are cheaper and all existing technologies have developed around them. We are going to have to invest and this is what we have been doing. I welcome that.

I am not up to date but I often got the impression in the past that there was not much of a conversation taking place between the two Departments on how to drive things forward when it came to renewable energy, land use issues, and areas of departmental commonality. This may have changed and I would be delighted to hear it if so. I am talking, however, about the situation as it was up to two years ago when I would ring people and one hand did not seem to know what the other hand was doing. Other than the proposals coming from the farming organisations, what vision or plan is contained in this renewable heat incentive scheme to add value to a community? We have been talking about sequestering carbon in forests, for example, and we know that the Government has given many grants to forestry. When the wood is cut, however, we could perhaps introduce systems or some kind of co-operative whereby all of the farmers within a certain radius could bring their crop, be it forestry or willow or whatever, and have it dried or turned into woodchip. From what I can see in the west and north west, we could introduce a system along these lines which would be much more labour intensive than the current model, thus creating much-needed value and employment in the local areas. While we encourage people to burn woodchip and the like, I have heard of people having to bring it down from Enniskillen, despite the fact that we are surrounded by forests. I would like to ask the witnesses what concrete plans have been made to develop this aspect of things and to show real value for communities that need to make the most of their natural assets, among them forestry and biomass.

I also have a comment on the area of willow and energy crops. I heard recently of the ways in which a particular farmer has to deal with his willow crop. First, the willow has to be harvested, and then the farmer in question has to bring it somewhere else to have it broken down. Anyone harvesting any other crop has a single machine in the field to do the job required, so the willow situation sounds highly inefficient and hit-or-miss. I think that Teagasc does a great job in advising and guiding farmers, but does willow come under its remit? Is it excluded because it is not food? Does it perhaps come under the general agriculture remit?

On the fuel side of things, Deputy Corcoran Kennedy and a number of other speakers mentioned the issue of palm oil, and I am trying to understand the logic here. I understand that many of our fuel crops are imported from outside of the EU. If we are taking in fuel crops like palm oil from south-east Asia, what about the carbon footprint incurred by the transport of this? How does this fit into the equation? A further issue highlighted by NGOs and by Irish Aid is the fact that energy crops are displacing food crops in the developing world, particularly in east Africa. This is not just a question of people going hungry to bring us energy crops. People are also being displaced from land by governments that may not be operating in the manner that they should. Will Mr. Brady explain how this matter is being addressed? Again, the crops in question have to be transported, thus generating a carbon footprint.

I will finish on the matter of our very carbon-efficient farming methods and the argument that people should be fed using the most carbon-efficient processes. To what extent does this argument cut the mustard in Europe? To what extent can we in Ireland argue that we produce food in a more efficient way than our counterparts in Italy, for example? Does Ireland actually get any credit for this, or is it just a matter of us telling ourselves that we are doing a good job with our beef genomic schemes and so forth? Does any of this actually have any currency when we discuss our targets and objectives in Europe?