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

It is critical if we are to win this battle against climate change that we have, as I heard a Deputy say yesterday, the people with us. This will not work on a punitive, wagging the finger and telling people what to do basis. It will only work if it is a better country everywhere. That applies particularly for rural Ireland, farming, forestry and land use. We can do this. We can deliver a low carbon society that is good for our people, good for nature and provides food security, healthier food and a long-term future that is stable.

I was lucky to meet one of the great pioneers of renewable energy, the German politician, Hermann Scheer. He was a social democrat, not a Green, and one of the great leaders of the solar revolution whom I had the pleasure of meeting. I always remember the closing paragraphs of his book, The Solar Economy, with its one main message, namely, farmers are critical. He argued they will be the heroes and will be key with their ingenuity and their knowledge of the land. He also said working out how we manage our land in the best way is going to be central to meeting the climate change challenge we face. He was right.

We need a national land use plan to help our farmers. It is not about telling the farmer how to use the land because they have the best knowledge of what they do on their land. Such a plan, however, has to set a framework where we plan our land, firstly, for thriving rural communities. We work out the people at the centre of this environmental transition we are about to take. It has to work out how we produce the best food related to the land and also how we store carbon, particularly in our peaty soils. At the same time, such a plan has to work out how we restore biodiversity and nature, particularly in our woodlands. It must work out, with all this coming together, how we improve the quality of our water and protect against floods. A knock-on consequence is that we start to tackle some of the local pollution problems we have with ammonia, nitrogen and other materials.

That land use plan will be critical to meeting our climate change targets. We are fortunate setting out on this because European Union policy states we have to head in this direction. Those nine principles behind the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, which is coming, are all about supporting this environmental and social agenda. It is about critically changing the power imbalances in the food system where the large processors - the people processing protein - make all the money while the primary producers are left with nothing. That has to change.

The European Union set out last week its Green New Deal strategy which is behind the €1.8 trillion stimulus package to get us out of the Covid economic crisis. Central to this is the farm-to-fork strategy which, again, is all about going green. It states we are going to reduce nitrogen fertilisers which makes sense economically, socially and environmentally. We are going to switch to organic. Europe is aiming to have 25% of land organic. Only 2.5% of land in Ireland is organic and that share needs to multiply in the next four to five years. We must reduce the amount of antibiotics used, along with reducing food waste while improving food security, by changing from these long supply chain systems where we import grain from South America to convert to protein here to then ship to China, all in packaging which China then sends back the other way. This whole system is going to change for the better.

People are worried because they have been presented with all sorts of scare stories that the Green Party will be bad for rural Ireland, farming, beef and dairy. I fundamentally disagree. Recently, I spoke to someone involved with the UCD Lyons research farm. It is working on the future of farming along with Moorepark and other places and how we grow grass. Our climate and land give us a significant advantage in grass growing. They now say, however, we need to switch from pumping fertilisers and slurries on to land to promote Italian ryegrass to grow as fast as possible. This is very vulnerable in either high-rain conditions, with wet fields, or in the very dry conditions we are seeing at the moment. Those shallow-rooted, nitrogen-pumped grass systems are not safe or secure and do not work in a climate-changing world. They say if we actually switch to mixed grass with natural flowers, weeds, herbs and other grasses mixed in, along with clover bringing in the nitrogen naturally, the farmer will get a far better return. The amount of nitrogen the farmer might have to spread might go from 250 kg per hectare down to 90 kg. That would be a dramatic reduction with savings to a farmer's fertiliser bill. Animal health is dramatically improved as a result too.

We can get a better price because we can go to the market and say that this is genuinely origin green because it is from a much more diverse, secure system.

In our upland areas, where we have really peaty soil, if we allow that peat to restore the carbon rather than letting it all evaporate by draining all that land, we can bring a cow or a sheep onto that and graze it in the summer period when the land naturally dries, and that helps us in our climate objectives because it stops the growth of birch or other native trees which would drain the land. I am convinced that we can go to our international markets and say that this meat, dairy or other product is playing its part in the climate solutions that we need to deliver, and get a better price for it, while being genuinely origin green in everything we do. That is the future that I see for Irish farming.

We also have to change forestry, not just farming. The Minister, Deputy Creed, is right that there is a change towards broadleaves and that Sitka spruce absorbs carbon too. We must, however, get away from the monocultural clearfell rotation forestry that we have at present because it does not promote biodiversity. We have to restore nature as well as storing carbon. We can do that in a variety of ways. I had the pleasure of sitting beside Deputy Fitzmaurice in recent years, up in the back bench where Deputy Sherlock is sitting, and he was forever nudging me and saying that we should use the idea of taking a hectare for every farm for what Deputy Michael Moynihan said earlier about schemes such as the rural environment protection scheme, REPS, where we get the farmer to help plant some native forestry that is genuinely mixed. We could perhaps let some land rewild, in some corner areas of the field that would not take from the productive capability of the farm. Farmers' knowledge of their land would allow nature to come back, store carbon, restore biodiversity and improve the water course. If one managed it in conjunction with one's neighbours, we could improve our rivers and the whole system. This is doable and we should support it to encourage a new generation of young people into family farming in our country. It delivers all the benefits.

At the same time, we should roll out agroforestry. Those grasslands also store carbon and provide that capability, which we know works. Smart young farmers throughout the country are doing this already. We just need to do more of what is working and what is right, which will give us this origin green in everything we do. Continuous cover forestry should not be clearfelled in order that in the long term, we get a continuous supply of high-quality timber which helps our local industries and helps us to keep population in rural Ireland. This is all possible. At the same time we should manage our peatlands, concentrating first and foremost on the cutaway large bogs, where by re-covering them with water, we will store millions of tonnes of carbon, which will allow us to meet our objectives. We should get the skilled people of Bord na Móna to do that because they are knowledgeable about how that can be done best. This is not a hardship posting; this is not a negative story. This will be good for rural Ireland. We can meet our targets and our obligations. I do not believe we have a choice. If we were to go the other way and said to count us out because we do not really want to be origin green and just want to go half way with our measures, at some point the rest of the world will rightly say that Ireland is not actually origin green in what it does.

Let us make this change and let us change the whole distribution system in order that we have a better connection to the Irish consumer and the Irish farmer, so that they get a better price. Let us be more diverse so that we start to develop horticulture and a range of other tillage crops, as well as meat and dairy, so that we are not reliant on just that small number of producers and processors on the international markets. Let us promote ourselves as the absolute best in class in protecting nature, in high quality, tasty food and storing carbon as we go. Being a green seller to the rest of the world would see Irish farming thrive.

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