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

Has the Minister of State a view on what our level of ambition should be? If the Minister of State opened an unencumbered scheme tomorrow, as he stated, he would see ten times that number applying.

There are real questions as to how we would do it to develop horticulture and tillage, as well as beef and sheep, which have been particularly popular up to this point. In any consultation process, however, we must know what is the scale of ambition. Where does the Minister of State want to go? I accept it doubled from €4 million to €10 million but to be honest, we are spending that amount of money marketing, on a single trade mission trip over to Japan or whatever, that we are an Origin Green country. We should be spending ten times that in making this switch because it is one of the main solutions that will help Irish agriculture get out of the crisis it is in at present. It helps us on water quality, carbon emissions and on price to family farms. There is a myriad of different benefits. In my mind, €10 million is not the scale of support we should be giving. I am keen to hear the Minister of State's vision as to where we should go, rather than it merely being a blank space into which we are consulting.

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