Mr. Vincent Roddy:

I thank Deputy Whitmore. She has asked some very good questions. I know Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Buckley have covered some of them quite well and I will carry on from there. When we look at the nature restoration law the first problem is that we have to look back at what happened with the Natura 2000 network of designations that was implemented initially in the mid-1990s and added to since. It has been a very bad experience for most landowners.

Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Buckley mentioned the devaluation of land. If you are looking at land currently, land that would previously get €3,000 to €4,000 per acre for forestry is not even getting €1,000 per acre. I know of one case of a farmer who has been offered €467 per acre by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage for designated land. Land that is not designated will get multiples of that, and depending on where the land is, you get from €10,000 to €20,000 per acre for land in other parts of the country. That is the major problem. Then we have to look at how the designations were applied. You effectively had a failure by the State in applying those designations. We had a policy of preservation, not conservation, and that was pretty well illustrated through these 38 activities requiring consent that landowners had to comply with. Those activities will effectively stall landowners from doing any farming. They were previously able to farm with the consent of the State. That has been a major problem and what has happened during that process is that we have seen - it is not us saying this but the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS - that those designations have stagnated, and in some cases, regressed. We must remember that this is land that was worth designating in the first place so we have to look at that.

This is about trust and farmers do not trust politicians. I mean no disrespect to members but farmers do not trust the Government when it says it will support them in a just transition. They do not trust it because the reality is that this is not what has happened. When we talk about-----