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

One of the recommendations from our climate report, which we have already agreed, is a national land-use plan to provide a strategy for how we use our land. Within that and by the end of the year or as soon as possible as part of our national energy and climate action plan, we should have an answer to the question of what the optimum level of anaerobic digestion is. That should be driven by environmental considerations first. While capital and other considerations are equally issues, they are not the key issue. We must ensure that if we are Origin Green in name, we are Origin Green in reality. We must not make the mistake that was made in Northern Ireland whereby certain types of production are increased massively, which may be harmful in other ways, just to get an anaerobic digestion grant out or to get capital projects over the line. We should run it from an environmental assessment first and that will need to be done by the end of the year in order to answer the question of what the optimum level should be to fit in with an Irish family farming system.

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