Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to again speak on this important subject matter. Yesterday when I spoke about this issue, we were talking about farmers, the protection of farmers and how the communication to farmers on what has been going on has been poor. We talk about climate action and the measures we are taking to try to deal with it to reach our targets but we have a huge opportunity with our public transport, rail networks and the extension of the western rail corridor north from Athenry to Claremorris. We have business people who want to carry their goods by rail freight rather than having trucks on the road. I plead with the Government to make the findings of the all-island rail review available as quickly as possible because a project like that is in a region which needs development. Second, it will join up Ballina, Westport, Castlebar, Tuam, Claremorris, Ennis, Limerick, Cork, the Port of Waterford and Shannon Foynes Port. We do not need to have the stamp of approval from the Northern Ireland Executive in order to do that. We need its input on other projects we want to do, however.

The Government needs to protect the line north from Claremorris to Collooney for future rail, rather than handing it away to put a greenway on it. The greenway can be accommodated alongside it. I was involved in a campaign on the western rail corridor for the past ten years and people wanted to put a greenway on the railway line. Had that happened, we would not be able to achieve the connectivity north from Athenry. I took the train to Dublin last week and at Athenry station, at least 35 people got on the train. It is a success story and we need to keep that going. That is one way of helping us with our climate action.

With our buildings and the retrofitting of our homes, there is a serious lack of resources, not money from the Government, for people to do the work. That is something we will have to deal with as we build up our resources. Training people in the area of retrofitting and making sure we get our houses up to a standard that is acceptable will also be important. We also need to encourage more the refurbishment of existing vacant properties, on which the Government has taken advice and our proposals on board, and the Croí Cónaithe vacant property refurbishment grant is a serious support for these houses that can come back into use. This is a carbon saving because we are not building from scratch. All of these are good things.

The one thing I will say about the rewetting and restoration of the land is as follows. We must enshrine in the legislation that private lands will not be rewetted, unless a farmer voluntarily wants to do it and unless there is a scheme of support in place for that farmer that will not cease with the change of a Minister or a Government. We can bring all of this to a successful conclusion but there are huge challenges and we have to deal with them, and I know we will. Opposition parties and Deputies are not here just to oppose things, or at least I am certainly not. I am here to be constructive. We have a lot of engagement to do with farmers. When I look at Bord na Móna and what it is going to do, I have serious concerns, which we talked about yesterday, about the farmers adjacent to that huge rewetting area. How will that be done from an engineering point of view?

A Deputy was talking earlier about ecologists and all the expertise we are lacking in this country. For example, I do not know how many planning authorities have an ecologist working for them. We have to move with the times. As this is the agenda, we have to put in place the programmes where we get people to qualify in these professions and we must do it in our colleges and universities as a matter of urgency. That is something we could do very handily.

That is why I say there is huge potential in everything we are doing in climate action. There are things that will have real benefit to people right here and now and there are long-term benefits. The communication on what we are doing needs to be better and we need to make decisions and get the implementation plans enacted as quickly as possible. Going back to the western rail corridor, when we were putting a proposal before the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, last year, over 120 Deputies and Senators across the entire Oireachtas, from every party, supported it. I acknowledge the fact that the Green Party, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and all Independents all supported it. It is great when we see that happening and we must get that kind of momentum and motivation going for other projects like this, and for other climate action measures we need to take. However, we need to do it in a fair and balanced way and bring people along with us.

I know the Minister of State and the Government will be doing that but the way the rewetting and the nature restoration law were communicated left a lot of question marks where people choose to fill the voids with information that might not have been entirely correct. I look forward to working with the Minister of State and the Government to see how we can protect and support farmers in anything we are doing. They are the custodians of the land and are the people who will be producing food that we will need into the future. With a growing population, we need to make sure we are doing that to the highest quality and the best standards we can. I know well the farmers will do it; there is no doubt about that. It is a question of whether they will have the supports to make the changes that are necessary.

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