Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail)
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I welcome all the participants. It is positive to see farmers and environmentalists around the same table. Not that long ago, we would had much more divergence, less dialogue and more bickering. There is some minor dispute, more about data than the global science of this. I understand the context of that. I am probably the only one on this side of the room who grew up in the environment talked about. Anywhere there is a challenge between rushes on one side and heather on the other, you are in that land. I was brought up on that. It was bred into us and was part of Government policy at the time to try to drain the land and improve it to the greatest extent possible. It helped to educate us and other families.

I now have the benefit of life and seeing how that practice needs to change but I will not lecture the people who have supported and elected me. I will try to encourage them to understand there is a way forward that is sympathetic to the environment. Being on this side, it is for me and others to try to ensure there is a viable livelihood for them. When we reflect on the way people emigrated from that land in the past when multiple families lived in relatively small areas, we see that is not viable any more. The land is barely able to sustain what is there.

We have to bring forward policies that meet the farming community's needs. It is incumbent on us to listen much more to the farming community. The science is established and accepted. That is a given. I keep saying of this debate that we need to move beyond the scientific debate and the environmental argument. That argument has been made and wider society accepts it. The only people left fighting, who of course will use everything available to them and every stone they can find to throw back, are the farmers because they feel this is being piled on them and forced on them. More than just respectful, we need to be open to their thoughts and ideas around how we should fashion policy to make their lives viable while accepting the scientific basis for the necessity for change. That is where it is challenging.

I get what Mr. Roddy said on the absence of trust. Let us look at the evolution of this. Government, through Teagasc and others, encouraged the draining of land and planting on the worst bits of it. On raised bogs, where there is a scum of peat across land that cannot be drained, there is dóib buí coming in to meet it on the other hand. Dóib buí is soil that does not drain water and nothing grows on it but rushes. It is existence farming for many of those people. They planted the land and if and when they cut that timber, the policy is they will have to replant it. That is the requirement.

We need to come forward with ideas. If it is not in their interest to replant it, farmers will not do so. They will not get a premium to do it again. We need to come up with a policy that makes rewetting worthwhile. In places like that, we might get away with it because a considerable number of farmers have already done it on light peaty land where there was what was referred to as wiggy bog or just one spit of turf. We need to change there.

Farmers completely get the idea that there is an impact on the environment and on their future. I represent farmers impacted by significant flooding. They know why that is happening but if someone takes a decision to wet a piece of land, it will also wet the neighbour's land. They know there is an environmental issue about what is going on.