Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Nobody could keep me from it. It is part of what I am. I am a Dub but I am connected to rural Ireland in a way that is real. We all are, and it would be foolish to make a false dichotomy.

The success of Dublin will help rural Ireland because it will give us resources that we can deploy. However, rural Ireland has to stand on its own two feet and thrive. We have to create wealth in whatever strategic direction we take to become really properly long-term sustainable. The reason going green will be the path to success is that there are four areas of the rural economy which can thrive by doing so. The first is the area of food and agriculture. It has to be low carbon and it has to be sustainable. We cannot abdicate. We cannot have the rest of the world taking on this incredible, momentous challenge while Irish agriculture says: "Sorry, count us out, we are an exception. We do not have to have the same targets as other people." That is not the clever way to go.

I met an interesting group of people in recent weeks. They were over here looking at what is happening on the ground. They were looking at farmers in the south east, in Kilkenny and Waterford, who are working with Glanbia in some of the latest farming practices. They were dairy farmers but the practices could be applied to other types of farming. They were absolutely green in their thinking. These were top range farmers; these guys were precision farming. They were really paying attention to grass growth, nutrients in the soil and the water system. They were really scientific in terms of measuring every corner of every field to figure out what was happening in the field, when to cut, when not to cut. They were reducing their inputs and getting better outputs. The really attractive thing about it was that they were working collectively in teams of 15. It was creating a local rural community of farmers talking to each other and sharing really precise information.

There is a great green hero, a German SPD politician, Hermann Scheer, who was a champion of this whole new clean energy, low-carbon economy. His book, The Solar Economy, written about 20 years ago, has as its absolute centre point the idea that the farmers are the front line. They are the heroes in this transition that we have to make. There is absolutely a bright economic future for Irish small family farms. A friend of mine who works in this area goes off to China every now and then to look at what they are doing. They have 15,000 to 20,000 cattle in one four-hectare lot. The Danes, the Dutch and others have gone that route and it does not work because it is capital-intensive and the farmer is left with the vagaries of market changes and prices. We should go for high precision, intense green farming and not just depend on the big international milk markets or try to compete against the Dutch or the New Zealanders, who trashed their country by taking the wrong, low-green or no-green route. We should go the other way. We go for high price, high quality, precision farming. Dairy is particularly suitable and we can see where it is viable and there is a way forward. It will be more difficult in beef, sheep and other areas, but there are other aspects of farming to which we can open up. Horticulture will have a crucial role. We need to start connecting Irish communities back to local farming so that we are not just buying all the €0.39 squashes from Lidl every week or looking for whatever is the cheapest of the cheap. We need to start valuing having connections between farmers and local communities across this island. That is the way to go.

It is a future in which farmers are the heroes of the green movement because they are the ones who are keeping the carbon in the soil. They are the ones who are providing flood management solutions. Critically, the Minister should be working with the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Creed, to ensure that they are the ones who get paid for protecting biodiversity. This row over cutting hedges and hedgerows is nonsense - we should be seeing it as our strategic advantage that we have bird wildlife and protect biodiversity and treat the whole of our land in a really careful way. All of us, rural and urban, have that in us.

Going green in food and farming is what we need. It also requires a certain intelligence in forestry. We cannot cover the country in monoculture, clearfell, 35-year cycle coniferous forest. We have already seen in places like Leitrim, Ballingeary, and Cúil Aodha how people have said "No" to that. They found the whole place was just getting covered in forest and getting blacked out. That is not the way we want to go. As part of this land management plan, we want to go for really high quality, continuous cover forestry, but unfortunately this takes a longer life cycle. We are talking about a 70 or 80 year return rather than a 30 year return. The price the farmer will get for timber in the end - it will be his children or grandchildren who will get it but we need to start thinking in this way - will be a multiple of what he would get for the low-quality timber from a fast cycle clearfell system.

Continuous cover forestry also creates a local environment that is wonderful. This brings us to the second key wealth creating aspect of rural Ireland, namely, tourism. They are all connected. If we get this right in terms of protecting biodiversity, it will support tourism. I know something about this. I worked in the sector for 15 years and my whole life was bringing people around. They came to Ireland for a sense of connection with something wonderful in our landscape as well as the welcome of the people. I could see it and I could sense it. I knew when it was working. It was good for people's health and souls when they got to rural Ireland and had a sense of wonder about the place. To get that, and to give and share it, we need to protect the wonder of the place. It comes with continuous cover forestry in a way that it does not with the dense, dark, nothing-beneath-the-canopy forestry that we have planted to date.

In this national plan, which is for the Minister, Deputy Ring, to influence, we are going to have to look at large sections of the land which are not as high yielding in grass, particularly, and in agriculture. We need to recognise that a large part of the north and west of the country is closer to parkland than intense agricultural land. We should pay people for developing and protecting every aspect of that so that it becomes a greenway. I see a potential greenway. The Wild Atlantic Way is a greenway from top to bottom. We should start connecting up all the greenways in a really ambitious, creative way so that one part of the country does not get ahead of the other. Every part of needs to be included. We need six greenways in Dublin. I am campaigning for them at the moment. We need the same in Connemara, Mayo, Sligo, Donegal and right the way up the north-west coast, down to the south-west coast and along the east coast as well. Tourism is by nature a green industry. People are not coming here to see motorways. They are coming to see a boreen and a connection to their vision and image of Ireland, which we have to maintain and provide. We should have high-quality infrastructure; let us not do all the branding around Origin Green but not actually deliver it.

The third area is energy. This is where we will create employment for rural Ireland. It is a different energy system. It is a distributed system. It is one in which rural Ireland has real potential. We have an incredible growing climate. We cannot use that growing material for burning in power stations but we can use some of the food plants for advanced combined heat and power, CHP. We can get farming communities working together in a community way so that they are not only working out the precision management of their grass, but also how to share waste material and other resources to produce anaerobic digestion. We must also work together so that there is community ownership of solar power, which is the next development. Rather than the big solar farms, big developers, big money, quarry banks and whatnot coming in from Australia, pumping money into big projects - this is where the Minister, Deputy Ring, needs to work with the Minister, Deputy Naughten, to deliver it - the first step is to get every one of those dairy farmers set up with solar panels on the barn, house or creamery roof so they are the ones who are starting to benefit from it. They have demand for it straight away in their cooling systems.

One-off housing in the country is going to be specifically fitted for this energy future.

One of the difficulties with an electric vehicle, to take that as an example, is how it can be facilitated in an apartment block or a row of terraced houses if there is no easy way to put in the grid connection. Rural one-off houses are perfectly placed for us to fit in an electric vehicle.

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