Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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I thank the two teams led by their two presidents, Mr. Eugene Drennan of the IRHA and Mr. Tim Cullinan of the IFA. I have tremendous respect for both organisations. I have been a member of the IFA for all of my adult life, and I am glad to be a member. I am a lifelong supporter of the work the IRHA does.

First of all, I will acknowledge the day that is in it by talking about women in farming. I want to acknowledge one woman whom I have never forgotten. I do not know whether the committee can see this. I always keep a sod of turf in my office. The reason the sod of turf is there is that if you forget where you came from, you do not know where you are going to. My grandmother cut turf barefoot in the bog at home. That was how they survived at that time. Her husband became disabled. She was the farmer. She was the woman who kept things going. It was her ability, her brains and her hard work cutting turf barefoot with a sleán that got us going out of the ground. I never want to forget that. That is why there is a sod of turf in my office and it will always be there as long as I am here.

Yesterday, I raised with the Taoiseach the land tax on zoned land. I have great concerns about this 3% tax. A number of farmers in Kerry have come to me. They are farming and want to continue farming. Their land may be zoned and may be suitable for housing, but these are people who are milking and growing grass. They want to keep farming. They are not interested in housing. The rest of the country and all of us are, of course, but farmers who want to keep farming and keep milking cows should not be taxed out of existence because the Government wants to force them into doing something they do not want to do. Of course a person who is hoarding land and not using it should be hit with the tax and should be forced to make that land available for property to built on because it is badly needed. That is an issue I would like to see the IFA being strong about. When land is being valued and transferred, I have this lifelong view in my head that a farm - I do not care if it is worth €100,000 or €100 million - is not yours. You do not take it with you. I have never yet seen a person taking a field into a coffin and into the ground. All we are is custodians of the land. We have it for a while. We try to make a living the best way we can. We try to improve it and then we transfer it on to the next generation. When I hear people talking about land being an asset and a farmer being worth a fortune because he or she has a fine farm and it is worth a lot of money, I say it is not because he or she is not selling it.

If you are not selling it, it is not worth anything. You are just using it, the same as you would use a shovel to go to work, or a JCB to dig a hole. You are using it for a purpose. When you have to transfer your land in an orderly way, you have to be careful about taxation. Therefore, we need to make sure the environment is made as easy as possible to transfer from one generation to another.

On the subject of diesel, I have had a high carbon licence for 35 years to allow me to sell fuel. This affects the two sides. We saw what the Government thought of farmers when it did nothing for us on agri-diesel and the rebate scheme. I am terrified at what is coming down the road when I see how they are tinkering with the VAT rate and how they want to do away with green diesel. Whether it is for a loading shovel or a tractor, they will want to make you use white diesel. If that is allowed to come in, it will be a disaster. We cannot allow that to happen, because common sense will have to prevail. You cannot put white diesel in vehicles that are only used in yards and for farming and forestry purposes.

On the subject of public transport, from Brosna to Ballinskelligs and from east to west, we do not have public transport or the type of transport that is available to other people. We have to be very careful about a lot of the airy-fairy ideas we listen to every day of the week in here. Common sense will have to prevail when it comes to issues like that.

When it comes to forestry, I have expressed my disappointment day after day at different committees and in the Dáil. We have not had such a lack of confidence in the forestry sector since 1946. That was the last time forestry was on the ground the way it is now under the present Minister, from whom I expected greater things. The confidence has gone out of it. You cannot get a felling licence. You cannot get a thinning licence. You cannot get permission to make a road. The whole thing is in a shambles. Everybody will tell you that. Foresters see the two-tier system with regard to Coillte and what they are doing. Are we interested in forestry and growing trees, or are we interested in making money for people abroad? I know what I want to do. I want to see forestry being owned by farmers, if a portion of their land is suitable, so that it will provide some income for them or their families in the future.

I will move on to the Irish Road Haulage Association because I want to cover another couple of subjects. Hauliers are being treated like criminals. When a person gets up in the morning and gets into a lorry, what are they doing? They are doing a thing that if it were not done, the rest of us would starve. They are keeping the wheels of this country going. This is an island nation. I have yet to see food falling out of the sky and onto the shop floor. It is delivered in vans, be they big, small, medium, or articulated lorries. These are the people driving through the night. Whether they are bread men, milkmen, or bigger transport people, they are delivering the food we eat. When we talk about how it is going to be delivered, we need to understand that there is no battery yet that will take between 10 and 40 tonnes over the county boundary. It is not there. It does not exist yet. There is no battery yet that will work a loading shovel in a quarry. We need to crush stone to build roads. We need to crush stone to make bricks to make blocks. We need to make ready-mix. You cannot do that with batteries. The sooner people in the Dáil cop on and realise that, and the sooner we give up the nonsense of thinking we can do it, the better. If we all blindly agree with this nonsense that we can manage without diesel, then we are going to starve, we will not have a house, we will not have a road and we will have nothing. We cannot manage without it. The most effective and efficient thing you can have in this world is a properly maintained and serviced diesel engine. That is a fact. If you take a battery car and the damage done to the environment to make that battery car, it is probably the most damaging thing you can have. Why would you scrap a perfectly good diesel engine to get a battery car that you can only go for a small journey in before looking for power? Where is the power coming from? We are producing less and less electricity, at more of a cost and we are telling everybody we should be using more of it. That is more madness and more insanity.

I will turn to Brexit. It has caused many difficulties for people, and none more so than the people in the IRHA. I thank them for their service and for what they do. Of course I want to thank the companies, but I also want to thank the drivers. I want to thank the mechanics who keep the wheels turning and have to work odd and unsociable hours in bad weather when breakdowns happen. Who goes out and gets the lorry going? The mechanics do. I thank the people who are working in the offices who organise the hire purchase and so on to keep the wheels rolling. Every one of these people is to be thanked, but do they get thanks? No, they do not. When you are out on the road, you can have a lorry pass a test only to be pulled into the side of the road. The hair stands on the back of my head when I pass a roadblock and see a haulier being pulled in.