Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have to confess I have not had enough time to fully prepare for this debate. There are a number of comments I would like to make because I have been listening to the debate for the past hour. I do not think anybody argues against biodiversity. Nature restoration has a kind of broad feelgood factor but I wonder how much understanding some of the people talking have of the complexity of land, agriculture and history. To what point in time are we seeking to restore nature? Do we want to restore it to what it was like 100, 500 or 1,000 years ago? We have been interfering with the landscape in this country, as seen in the Céide Fields, for thousands of years. I recall, years ago, when I was in the Department - I was a Minister - I had a great brainwave about restoring a fairly famous castle. I mentioned this to one of the Department officials. He looked me in the eye and asked, "Minister, to what period do you want to restore it?". I said, "What do you mean? I want to restore it to its heyday". He said it was a heyday of 300 years, during which time they kept building, adding and changing. He asked me to tell him what period I was talking about. It was a valid question. When we talk about nature restoration, it is highly complex and takes a huge amount of knowledge.

In many cases, those most knowledgeable about the capacity of their land are traditional farmers who have been farming land for generations in the one area.

One of the interesting projects going on at the moment is trying to entice the corncrake to come back. I do not know much about the corncrake, but I am learning fast. I mention the case of a particular island that was highly inhabited, Inis Toirbirt. There would be a similar situation on nearby Inis Toirc, but I have been on Inis Toirbirt more often than Inis Toirc. I know one of the people who grew up there and she now has a holiday home there. She explained to me there were 100 breeding pairs on the island when she was a child, but the island was full of houses at that time. The reason for this was that they had a mowing pattern that suited the corncrake. Without that mowing pattern, the corncrake will not survive. When the people left the island, the corncrake stopped breeding and disappeared. Now on Inishbofin, Inis Toirbirt and all these islands, there are programmes that have human intervention to achieve their objectives.

I hear a lot of people talk about wilding saying let us rewild the hills, rewild this and rewild that. There are parts of Connemara that if we wild them, we will get rhododendron. The same people who want us to rewild are telling us they do not want rhododendron. In other places, rewilding would lead to furze, bracken and heather growing to a very woody state. This would give you the most fantastic tinderbox if you wanted a hill to go on fire, accidentally or otherwise. I am trying to put across that this is highly complex. Many people would say that there were a lot more songbirds 50 or 100 years ago and I agree with that. Thankfully, where I live I hear the birds singing every day when I get up at this time of the year. One of the reasons for the decline in songbird numbers is that we used to have small numbers of people tilling an acre or two acres in potatoes, oats and so on. That is gone. Now we have monoculture because we pay people for monoculture. Schemes like ACRES pay for monoculture. I could never understand why REPS did not provide funding to people who tilled a half-acre or acre of land for vegetables, or whatever, because that is very good for nature. We need to be careful about the term we use and the meaning of it. As far as I can see, as somebody who went from the city and had to learn fairly fast on my feet in a rural area, this is highly complex.

If I may say so, the people who know most about how it was, and what the ecological balance was, are not those who have done academic courses. A lot of that knowledge is more deeply ingrained in the rural community. I agree with Deputy Paul Murphy, and am very conscious, that the introduction of headage payments was a rush of blood to the head to try to increase income. We had headage payments for sheep and the disadvantaged areas payment as part of the way it used to be. Yes, that encouraged numbers and overstocking but, if the record is checked, I was the Minister who started the destocking. I was the one who went to the hill sheep farmers as somebody who had worked with hill sheep farmers and been manager of a hill sheep farmers' co-operative. I told them we were going to destock, but I paid them well to destock because they had to put bread on the table like any working family in this country. That is often overlooked.

A letter was sent by the Commissioner for the Environment, Oceans and Fisheries. I do not trust Europe. I do not trust that Europe trusts itself, because I do not think it can tell us. At the end of it, the Commissioner came to the issue of whether farmers will be forced to do anything. He obviously said they will not be and so on, but then he came to the issue of agricultural payments:

Regarding your concern on the payments under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), in the Nature Restoration Law, the term ‘condition’ is only used in relation to habitat types listed in Annexes I and II [which are very extensive in the west of Ireland, in areas which were never wilfully destroyed with intensive farming]. There is no direct link between the classification of an area of a habitat type listed in Annex I as being “in good or not good condition” under the Nature Restoration Law and the respect of the good agricultural and environmental conditions (GAECs) and statutory management requirements (SMRs) under the CAP. It is quite possible that all obligations under each GAEC standard and SMRs are respected in a given area and, at the same time, such area hosts an Annex I habitat type that is in not good condition.

Now we come to the crucial sentence:

CAP payments depend on definitions and conditions as set in Regulation (EU) No. 2115/2021 and in the CAP strategic plans. NRL neither interferes with those conditions nor amends CAP applicable regulations.

What could amend the CAP applicable regulations - this is why I do not trust them - is the fact that the present CAP finishes in 2027. Is anybody telling me there will not be a call for alignment with the nature restoration law in relation to payments after 2027? Are we to believe that the people who are so elegant in their version of what nature restoration will involve here will not be back saying that if farmers do not comply with a new GAEC, they are not going to get paid? Many of these things, therefore, lead to income uncertainty. I think every Deputy would accept that if huge income uncertainty was structurally built into any other job by the State and by Europe on a seven-year cycle, there would be outrage. Then people wonder why farmers give out.

I have had not had many dealings in recent times with the very intensive farmers in the south east and the south. I know very few such farmers and I do not have the knowledge of their practices. I have more knowledge of other types of farming. There are lots of pressures in the lives of farmers. I know that like everybody else, one of the biggest pressures they face is to have an adequate income to live in the area they live in. I hear a lot of talk about adequate income, but sometimes the schemes introduced to solve one problem create another and create another distortion. Another phenomenon that has been significantly associated with compensating farmers is that certain schemes are highly complex for the most innocent of farmers, who have very low stocking levels. It is not worth their while setting up huge computer records and so on. Consequently, they are the ones suffering the income loss.

As I said, I fully accept nature restoration. I see a lot more wilding, or farmland not being farmed, than I did. One of the interesting phenomena is that if anybody comes to our area, it is very hard to see the lake because bushes have grown up all along the road. We need a debate about whether all of that is 100% a good thing. We see a lot of places where, long before mechanical devices became common on farms in the area, little drains were cleared and the hedges were cut. These were very good hedges. They were very thick because people did not use a machine, but cut them and folded them into themselves and so on. Many people hanker for those days, but instead of hankering and saying we should recreate those days, they are creating something totally different that is going to have a totally different effect.

In certain ways they are not dealing with the biodiversity challenges that mixed farming created. It created a much more diverse ecology. Now we have virtually eliminated any mixed farming - any type of sowing, tilling or growing of vegetables, potatoes or anything - from huge swathes of the west of Ireland. This debate needs to be less emotive. There needs to be less giving out by those who say we are not doing it the way they are telling us, even though they have never farmed in their lives. A lot of that goes on. People who have never farmed or worked on farms are telling people who know and understand the land how to solve the problem, rather than consulting them. If I have one plea from today, it would be to protect people's incomes. People have to live. If we get rid of all rural habitation, close all the schools and destroy all the communities, we are destroying something that is equally diverse and valuable. On the other hand, we can work with the people who know because they have been farming for generations in the same place.

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