Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that the Minister is here to answer my questions on this issue despite his busy schedule. This issue has caused great anxiety among rural people.

The way the Commission has introduced this leaves a lot to be desired. Thankfully, we now see a significant pushback to these proposals, not only in this country but across Europe. Whether it will get through the environmental committee in the European Parliament now is open to question. The questions about and scrutinising of these proposals are long overdue.

Farmers and rural people have worked extremely hard and spent much money to make land productive. There is a view that they would be forced to rewet this land and let it go back to a wild state. As I said, much clarity needs to be brought to what the proposals are. The proposals need to be modified. The targets initially proposed by the Commission about the amount of land it wants to be restored and rewetted also, in my opinion, have to be readjusted. The whole knowledge of rewetting and rewilding needs to be investigated too. Yesterday, the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine, which I chair, visited a timber facility in the west of Ireland. Some 180 people are directly employed there and 250 more are indirectly employed. Raw timber comes in there and an end product comes out which is suitable for construction.

Regarding the land that is now being proposed to be rewetted or rewilded to try to reduce our emissions, in my opinion, we have not done a full balance sheet on the benefits that timber products have in construction in our battle to reduce emissions. Outside the timber facility's office yesterday, there was a small parcel of timber ready to go into construction. There was a tonne of carbon stored in that timber. When that timber goes into construction, replacing concrete products, it will store that carbon forevermore. While obviously some lands are not suitable for forestry, I think the full balance sheet has not been worked out regarding when this land grows timber, the benefits of that timber in replacing other products, and its substitution for concrete products, which have many emissions attached to their production. We need to go back and look at that seriously.

We now have experts speaking about rewetting bogs, saying that for the next 50 to 80 years, it will increase the emissions rather than reduce them. They say methane will increase the most. The Minister, Deputy McConalogue, will be well aware of methane, the retention of our derogation and so on, and the battle we have on the emissions side in the dairy sector. The scientific expertise is now there to say that for the next 80 years, if we rewet our bogs, it will increase methane emissions. Much scientific and environmental research needs to be done to know exactly what the benefit of this would be.

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