Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

We in People Before Profit welcome the passing of the nature restoration law. If we had an MEP, which we hope to have at least one of after the forthcoming European election, we would have attempted to strengthen it but would have then voted for it. I will set out the reasons we would have done so. First, it is very simple. It has been laid out by a bunch of people so at least the basic facts are not, apparently, in dispute in this debate but the consequences of those facts clearly are. We are in the middle of an intense biodiversity emergency - a sixth mass extinction event. Across Europe, 81% of habitats that were supposed to be protected by the habitats directive 30 years ago are not in good condition now. Europe is a disaster for biodiversity and Ireland is at the very bottom of the pile. We are the 13th worst country in the world for biodiversity, a far cry from the greenwashed image the Department of agriculture - using public money - attempts to portray, as it tries to create the impression that big fields full of grass are somehow what nature is meant to be in this country.

Native forests once covered 80% of our land but have been reduced to a measly 1.5%. Almost none of our protected nature sites have effective conservation or management plans. There is massive biodiversity loss and damage even in the crown jewels of Irish nature like Killarney and Connemara national parks. We like to give out, correctly - the whole world should give out - about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the earth. However, it has been done to our equivalent, although not by all of us to the same extent, by draining, burning and extracting from our bogs. In light of all of that, the key nature restoration law proposal to restore 20% of land and sea areas by 2030 seems extremely modest. It is the absolute minimum we should be doing to avoid further biodiversity meltdown. We regret that the final version passed was watered down a lot from the original version. As you see again and again in European proposals, there are massive lobbying operations. I think there are thousands of lobbyists for every MEP. Significant pressure was put on politicians by profit-hungry lobbyists for intensive agriculture, unsustainable fishing and the plantation forest industry. They engaged in an unprecedented campaign of scaremongering around this law. They succeeded in having the proposal watered down.

Unfortunately, Sinn Féin bowed to that pressure. It voted with Fine Gael's colleagues in the European People's Party - hand in glove with the climate and biodiversity-denying far right - to try to block even this watered-down version of the nature restoration law. It went along with the lobbyists who invented all kinds of dire consequences for food production and security, all of which were complete nonsense. The truth, as a coalition of 3,000 actual scientists came together to say, is the exact opposite. It is a pity Sinn Féin chose to follow the lobbyists rather than the science and the public on this issue. Some 97% of respondents to a public consultation on this law supported legally binding EU restoration targets across all ecosystems. We know nature restoration is popular as well as ecologically essential. Sinn Féin needs to follow the science and listen to the people, not the lobbyists, on this issue. If it did, it would realise that protecting biodiversity and restoring nature will not undermine food production or security. Nature and biodiversity are the whole basis of food security. It is true that no farmers means no food. It is also true that no nature means no food. Without nature and functioning ecosystems, eventually there will be no food production. With the collapse of biodiversity, you lose out in the number of insects of so on, the consequence of which will be a crisis in food production in this country and worldwide. That is the trajectory we are on towards absolute catastrophe. We need to take a long-term view of this instead of what Sinn Féin and most of the leadership of farmers' organisations in this country and across Europe have chosen to take by swallowing and regurgitating the lies of industry lobbyists and choosing to cut off their nose to spite their face. Rather than seeing this law as a positive opportunity to reward farmers for farming in an environmentally friendly way, they sought to block it and water it down.

For years - this is the truth, although farmers are not to be blamed for it - we paid farmers to degrade nature by overgrazing sheep in ecologically sensitive areas, by overstocking the best agricultural land and by overexpanding the national herd. That was done by farmers responding to incentives created by the State. That is the truth. Governments have responsibility for that. That does not mean we should continue in that direction. We are in the midst of a climate and biodiversity emergency that is not just causing the sixth mass extinction event but is also threatening our survival and that of the human race. Ultimately, hundreds of millions or billions of people are faced with death worldwide unless we act now to stop it. We need to change the nature of the incentives. We need to incentivise farmers not to bring us further over these catastrophic cliffs by rewarding them richly for restoring nature and reducing carbon emissions. This has to happen on a massive, unprecedented scale. It is not about piecemeal environmental schemes tagged onto a model of industrialised agriculture that is deeply damaging to biodiversity and the climate. Instead, we need a rational, democratically planned, sustainable food system in which restoring nature and protecting biodiversity would become one of the main sources of farmers' income and, in many cases, the main source. We need farmers to save the future of our planet and we need to make a political decision to pay them handsomely to do that. That, for me, is the major flaw of this law. It does not justify voting against it but the work now needs to be done on it. It does not specify how small farmers in particular will be paid to carry out the vital work of nature restoration. We need to listen to farmers on this issue and work with them to come up with the best ways of achieving this. Crucially, we need to ensure it is small farmers, rather than big dairy farmers and the agrifood industry, who reap the benefits of nature restoration. There needs to be a massive redistribution of wealth and resources in agriculture, just like in the rest of the economy.

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