Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the four organisations for their excellent presentations. My former colleague, Mr. McCormack, spoke about putting climate change to bed. I do not believe we will ever put it to bed. While we can meet the challenges it presents, we will face climate change challenges for as long as we are around.

My conclusion, having listened to the four presentations, is that we can find solutions to the climate change challenges facing the country. Mercosur and Brexit are out of our control, but we can do many things that will put us in an advantageous position in dealing with climate change.

Great emphasis was placed on the efficiency of Ireland's dairy sector. We are the best in the business in producing milk in a sustainable manner. None of the delegates addressed the sustainability of steer beef production from the perspective of climate change. Ireland has a steer producing beef sector. How sustainable is our method of producing beef?

Most of the delegates referred to forestry.

There are a number of things that can be done. To plant 20 ha of unenclosed land one has to have 80 ha of enclosed land to match it. There is a lack of logic in this as there is a lot of land lying idle that could be a carbon sink for us. There is a blanket ban on forestry in designated areas, such as hen harrier areas, which also shows a lack of logic as there are opportunities to improve sustainability in this regard.

What role can Bord na Móna play in the future of biomass? It has vast tracts of land lying idle and not making any contribution to our carbon footprint challenge. What can be done in this respect? We see digesters on European farms and there is much more advanced technology in European farmyards that we have. The headline in the farming section of the Irish Independentdeals with slurry spreading but we have ways to overcome it. We have to look at what Europe and even Northern Ireland are doing but we can do a lot ourselves to put ourselves on a higher plane than the rest of Europe.

We have renegotiated our derogation and it is imperative for our dairy industry that we hold onto it. It is the one challenge the dairy industry will have, going forward, and it could become the new quota for us. The quality assurance scheme is going to be tied in to food sustainability and it is a good progression as it will strengthen our case for any future derogations.

I would like to explore the issues of grid availability and a price tariff. We can talk about alternative energy production, such as solar energy and wind farms, but the backlog for access to the grid is a huge challenge. If we are serious about alternative energy use, we have to have certainty on the price of energy in order that we know it will be economical to get it from alternative sources. The vast majority of waste and the vast majority of energy crops can be used in the production of alternative energy, whether it be for gas, electricity or heating, the last of which is probably the most economical. We are behind the rest of Europe in this area and all four presentations hinted at that. There has to be a far greater focus on this.

We also have to focus on the farmers who have spent huge amounts of money on slurry storage and this comes back to municipal districts and county councils. We have a lot of population centres which still have no wastewater treatment plants and there is no point in one side doing everything it can to improve our position when municipal authorities fall down on water quality as this hampers our arguments for derogations.

A lot of things have to be put in place but the presentations show that we have the ammunition to show that we can be more sustainable food producers than most of the rest of Europe. What are witnesses' views on steer beef production and how sustainable that can be? None of the presentations addressed this. How are we going to get around our problems with unenclosed land? What about ash dieback? Land is lying idle which could be planted to meet our targets. A lot of other countries have more to fear from climate change than we have. We have made a lot of progress and, with a few commonsense decisions, we could turn climate change to our advantage. Mr. Healy spoke about Mercosur but if the Commission was serious about climate change it would look at the issue of importing beef from South America.