Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this very important issue. I welcome the staff from the Tuam office who are here today to do some training, and also Rory from County Derry who has joined us as well.

I must first compliment Deputies Fitzmaurice and Harkin and the group for bringing forward this motion. It is timely that we discuss this in an open and forthright way. There is a lot of fear, anxiety and worry among farmers on what the future holds for them, especially for young farmers who are deciding whether to get into farming or to go out working while farming part-time. Some of the issues arise because the communication process is not very well attended to. This leaves the place open for every kind of conjecture and every kind of fear to be put in place.

I am disappointed in the Government's response today because the motion we are discussing relates to how we protect farmers and their livelihoods, while at the same time having climate action measures which we all accept are needed.

The request in this motion is to bring in legislation to ensure no private lands will have to be rewetted, which is a very simple ask. If someone wants to do it on a voluntary basis, they can do it on a voluntary basis if the compensation measures are there and it is worth their while to do it. The Government keeps saying there are enough public lands that can be rewetted to meet the requirement up to 2050. If that is the case, why can we not enshrine in legislation that private farms will not have to be used unless the farmer does it voluntarily? Why can we not build that into legislation? This is a very reasonable thing to ask. The motion in the House today is very reasonable.

I heard some of the Deputies questioning the motivation for people speaking about this particular subject. As a Deputy coming from a rural constituency in Galway East, I know it is a serious issue.

I know the geography of the land there and there are a lot of wetlands. They may not have them in the big dairy centres or the major production plants or feeding plants that we have around the country. We may not have the rewetting issues there but in the family farm that I was raised on, which was a full 30 acres, we had to do some drainage back in the 1960s and 1970s. I partook in that and we put in shores to make sure we had enough land to try to eke out an existence. At the same time, my father had to work all his life and we had to help my mother farm the land. Part of that process was reclaiming land and putting land that was wet into use as summer land. It did not have any effect on nature and it helped us to produce good-quality food for the table for ourselves and to keep the farm viable.

The other big issue I want to raise relates to compensation. This comes up all the time because we are told that if someone's land has to be rewetted, they will receive compensation. The word "compensation" is a bad word for farmers because the history of compensation is that schemes have been set up to deal with the habitats directive but as governments come and go, so do the compensation funds. I have asked before for it to be enshrined in law that if somebody is rewetting their lands, the farmer should be compensated for that and that compensation should be for ever more rather than just for two or three years until the Government says it has no money to do it or is reconfiguring the scheme. There is a lot of polished language around it but the net result is the farmer ends up with no compensation. The designation plans we have at the moment have been a bad experience for farmers. We need to bring certainty to whatever is being done.

The other question I want to raise relates to the issue of public lands and particularly Bord na Móna lands. We will have huge intensification of rewetting on those lands. I do not know how many thousand hectares are going to be rewetted. Coming from a construction background, I understand well that if you put water into land, it will seep into the ground and bring up the water table in the ground and that will spread wherever it will find a level. Adjacent lands will be compromised with the rewetting. This problem has not been looked at properly. I compliment the Minister of State as he attended a meeting here with some farmers' representatives. They have a concern about the unintended consequences of rewetting this Bord na Móna land. Any land that is rewetted is going to cause issues on adjacent lands. It is no fault of the farmer but they will be left with the consequences. Before any rewetting is done, we have to see the engineering proposals as to how it will be contained within the lands it is supposed to be contained in, even though I do not think that is possible. Second, if it does breach the land it is supposed to be contained in, how will the farmers be compensated for that or how will the problem be addressed on their lands? That needs to be done. The Minister of State gave a commitment that he would look at that. I would hope that would be done well in advance of any proposal being brought forward.

Some people wonder about how we are going to achieve the climate action plan. From my own experience, if we keep pushing and forcing stuff on people, we will get pushback and we will not get things done. We seemingly see farming, farmland and agriculture as a soft touch. For instance, we need to tackle public buildings. The Minister of State knows this and I know he agrees with it. There are thousands of public buildings that we need to retrofit, which are pumping CO2 into the air. It is an investment we have to make in all the things we do there. We need to look at that.

We need to look at transport. A pet project of mine is the western rail corridor. If we are going to take trucks off the road and get haulage done through rail freight, we have to make sure we have the infrastructure to do it. I have total belief that we can do it. We need to do it urgently so we can take the vast majority of our goods - though not all of them - off the roads and just have them freighted. Places like Coca-Cola down in Ballina are already doing this. They are doing it because it was set up by a number of individuals who saw the potential 20 years ago in rail freight. The West on Track group dealt with Irish Rail and had an awful job convincing it to do this. I know the Minister for Transport is very positive towards rail, rail freight and rail passengers. Let us get on with those things, which are easy to do and will help people, rather than getting pushback.

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