Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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No, but it is very well funded, well paid, is tax free and the product is tax free at the end of it. The way it has been designed is to promote farming and forestry, where you are not giving up farming but rather stitching it into your system. It will take time for that to take off, but it will. What the Deputy said is true. There have been historical examples. Farming is a precarious profession, because if a farmer tries to risk something, such as growing a new crop, the climate or market can go against him or her. This is one of the reasons, three weeks ago, the Government supported an ash dieback support scheme for those farmers who lost out on that in order for them not to feel burnt by it and help them maybe to look at forestry again.

Second, on new incomes, solar power will provide a significant amount. What the Government agreed last week was a guaranteed price for solar power to allow farmers to use that as an income stream, as well as covering some of their cooling costs, particularly if they are dairy farmers. That has been a new significant new development in recent weeks.

Today we agreed we would provide €40 million in grants for anaerobic digestion. That will be followed in the autumn by the renewable heat obligation scheme that will further incentivise the use of the gas. I expect that the real benefit for farming will be that there are other industries that use gas in a high, intense heat industrial application and for which there cannot be any replacement which will use biomethane for those processes and be willing to pay for it. For example, I believe data centres are coming around to this. You have to be zero carbon in what you do, and you do that by having renewables, backed up by storage, backed up by biomethane as an emergency backup power, which allows you to run a zero-carbon data centre. They too will be willing to pay for it. We are providing €40 million of first upfront grants. We want to get the industry working. There are only two anaerobic digesters in the country whereas there are almost 80 up North. We need to get it going. We will provide further grant support through the infrastructure climate and nature fund. The next Government will do it. It will be 2026, but we will agree it in principle in the coming weeks with the Department of public expenditure. As I said, the key thing is getting other off-take agreements with other industrial applications. It will effectively be a transfer from other Irish high-capitalised industries into those 130,000 small Irish businesses in farming. When we get that sort of contract arrangement, it will be a good ten or fifteen years, and it will be a very good, stable income stream, one of many we need to provide for farming.