Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail)
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I would like to focus on the area of hemp. Quite often, the production and use of hemp has certain connotations, perhaps because the plant itself looks like marijuana. Perhaps that is where those associations come from. The Chair will be glad to know I am going to mention west Cork again. There are two fantastic students from Newcestown in west Cork, Cian and Caoimhe Walsh, who go to St. Brogan's College. The reason I am mentioning them is that they won the ECO-UNESCO young environmentalist award for research they did on the use of hemp. They have an Instagram page on the subject. Their research was astounding and incredibly eye-opening in terms of the potential uses for hemp right across different areas, particularly in respect of construction and the making of hemp blocks and hempcrete, its sustainability, the potential for carbon storage in the hemp blocks themselves and the carbon sequestration value of growing the plant. The hemp plant stores more carbon than the same area covered by deciduous trees. My point is that perhaps this is an area that we should really focus on and ramp up production and research in. Hemp could potentially be the future, not just in making our buildings more sustainable, but in making farming more sustainable through sequestration. I also believe that from a biodiversity perspective, the hemp plant has potential benefits compared to other crops that do not have the same biodiversity value. Is hemp the future?