Mr. Niall ? Brolch?in:

I wish to address the carbon credits question. The key blockage – which was the question asked – is the fact that we do not have a framework in place in Ireland. In Germany, they have worked at a regional level, where the regional government is obviously much bigger than it is in Ireland. Our regional governments probably are not suitable; it is probably a national system that we are talking about. In France, they recently set up a national framework. Usually, it works in partnership. In the UK, they have a system called the Peatland Code and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, which is an international organisation. The UK branch of it works hand in hand with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Defra, which is the UK's equivalent of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Basically, all the schemes tend to work in partnership between Government and, let us say, a trusted organisation locally. The key thing is to set up a framework in the first place or some sort of one-stop shop, so that if a landowner wants to sell carbon credits, make money on it and use that money for the purposes of restoring the peatland or land, they know who to talk to. At the moment, there are a number of people at an academic level setting up schemes in Ireland or looking at the potential of doing that. Those need to be supported and encouraged. Government needs to take this by the scruff of the neck. There is a real danger that we will get into, as one academic described it, the wild west, where people will literally be selling things. They can do that legally. They can just say, “I will sell you a few carbon credits and here I got Mickey Joe down the road to verify those.” Those are not verified; that is not sufficient verification. We need proper verification and Government to take a hand in this and not just to leave it to the private sector or academia.