Luke Flanagan (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Private Members' motion from Fianna Fáil and I will support it. All Member from rural areas have been contacted by farmers about this. Farmers are in serious distress. Some people who contacted me reckoned this was predictable and that something should have been planned but it was not. When the money came for the transportation of fodder, it was welcomed but farmers are still contacting me and saying the problem has not yet been solved. One issue raised by farmers is the knock-on effect this will have on fodder for next year, given that many have animals out on ground they would otherwise have used for silage.

We know the reasons why this happened, namely bad weather conditions, but we have a localised condition in the Shannon Callows area in south Roscommon. This needs to be dealt with when one considers Food Harvest 2020. If we want to achieve the aims of Food Harvest 2020, we must maximise the amount of fodder available. That will only happen in the Shannon Callows if we get the National Parks and Wildlife Service and put it back in its fundamentalist environmental box, which is spreading the wilderness idea around Ireland. We are slowly but surely turning Ireland back into a wilderness. Silting from Bord na Móna is blocking up the channels of the Shannon, which leads to flooding. In one place, an island has formed over the past ten years and caused a blockage. When farmers went to the National Parks and Wildlife Service and asked for the island to be removed, they were told it was protected. How was it protected if it did not exist a decade before?

This is what I mean by wilderness. Are we heading in that direction? That might be grand for environmentalism in countries that have masses of land, such as the United States and other big countries, but we do not have that. We have a limited amount of land. We must work out who we are trying to protect with these policies. I was told by Michael Silke of the IFA that the corncrake has been wiped out in this area because of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. At the same time, it is affecting farmers' ability to get fodder. If we want Food Harvest 2020 to be achieved, we will have to maximise the fodder available and put the National Parks and Wildlife Service back into its fundamentalist, environmentalist box.

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