Mr. John Keane:

I thank the Deputy for the question. Our comment on impact assessments comes off the fact that we would like all these measures to show what impact this will have on all those things, including land mobility, land availability, production and the opportunities it will create for young people to get into the sector. Right now, from where we sit and from our perspective as Macra na Feirme and young farmer representatives, that is not something that is taken into consideration. We should take it from a young farmer's point of view right now. Even looking at the past ten days, we were lucky enough to be sitting in this committee room this night last week speaking about the EU nature restoration regulation. I was in Brussels yesterday where the industrial bills regulation is something being talked about at EU level. The pesticides regulation is also being discussed. We also had a recommendation from the food vision group the day before yesterday, which referenced reduction and taking land away from being available to anybody working in breeding livestock in order to use it as productive land.

Land is the most limiting resource that any farming enterprise has in terms of its ability to grow. Our reservations here are that all of these policies, regulations and Bills are coming forward without a detailed assessment on what impact they will have on the people who will have to implement them on the ground. We have an environmental assessment that, in the context of the EU nature restoration Bill or of the Green Deal, refers to meeting the targets in biodiversity and refers to the targets on water quality which are all important and ample measures we should be supporting, but it says nothing about what the future of the sector will be in ten or 20 years. There is a constant narrative that CAP funding will sort out all of these issues. If CAP funding will sort out all of these issues that are being mentioned, a euro is all that will be signed to any single scheme to delivery anything because every time we hear about anything being dealt with at a European level or here, it is CAP funding that will sort that out for us. That is a limited and declining budget if one looks at inflation and the cost of production.

What needs to be done is the impact assessment, if one follows the line of the environmental assessment, and that creates a template for investment in how it is achieved. We have seen it under the ambition under CAP where one of the key objectives was generation renewal. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine invested the very same supports here as it has done since 2014 and we are expecting a different outcome. Einstein, to my recollection, had a fair theory on what that will achieve.

We have ambition here under the food vision group about creating viable producers with enhanced well-being. I would like to know when we will start dealing with the viable producers. Are we to deal with it at the end when every other policy is drawn up, when every other instrument is designed and when the opportunity is no longer there?

Unless I have missed something, I will hand over to Mr. Hanrahan.