Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I come from a farming background. The people doing the greatest disservice to Irish agriculture are those like the previous speaker who pretend that holding out against the change we need to make in agriculture and in all dimensions of our lives will make it easier, that the hold-outs will win the day by resisting, to the very last ditch, the ending of untenable practices and that this will provide a future for Irish agriculture or for rural Ireland. That is a totally blind alley. Every sector, regardless of what the sector is, will need to have sustainability at the heart of its long-term strategy for prosperity. The future for prosperous Irish farms lies in having sustainable methods of production. This means changing some of the ways in which we farm. Those who pretend they can resist that and who stick their heads in the sand are leading those they purport to represent up a blind alley. That really needs to be emphasised.

As much as anyone who comes from rural Ireland, I am aware that we need to be sustainable. We need to respect nature because it provides the goods we all enjoy. We need to recognise that current practices globally are extracting three times what nature can restore every year. We are running into deficit because of the way we treat some of our assets. We need to correct that, but correcting it does not mean abandoning food production or the reputation we have. It means enhancing the reputation Ireland has for good food because we can verify that it comes from sustainable practices. We can also verify that we are not polluting our rivers and that we are restoring them to a pristine condition. Farmers know better than any of us what it is to manage land in a sustainable way. They have husbanded our land for years. They know how to do this, but we must ensure that they are incentivised and supported to do it.

Many people looking at the future of family farming do not see in sufficiently vivid colours what a prosperous family farm will look like in ten or 20 years' time. There is a strong onus on the Government to help portray that. Not enough has been done to show how this can be done. We need to go beyond the Common Agricultural Policy and develop new approaches. Imaginative and all as the Common Agricultural Policy has been, it is not sufficient to drive that. This is why I welcome a national nature restoration plan whereby the Minister of State and his colleagues will spell out in detail the pathway that can bring us to these established targets.

I sat on the committee that heard from the citizens' assembly. Some 60% of those who were on the assembly came from rural Ireland. Many of them were farmers. In most cases, they came with unanimous recommendations about the direction in which we need to travel.

I welcome the passage of the nature restoration Bill at EU level. Important clarifications have emerged over the course of the debate. I heard Seán Kelly MEP emphasise recently that this is to be voluntary and incentivised, that it has graduated targets and that it incorporates the new emergency brake. This law will help farmers to adapt to a long-term sustainable future for their sector.

As I have said to the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, and his colleagues, we are letting slip the need to have a sector-wide approach in food, construction and all of the other key sectors. Making a sustainable supply chain in food is not all just about farmers and their production methods. It also has to be about the role of processors, supermarkets, and of the many who waste food throughout the commercial and non-commercial sector. It needs to be about how we change practices right along that supply chain in order that it can become sustainable.

The corollary of that is processors will pay more for produce farmed in a sustainable way compared with produce that is not. We have not yet created a bigger tent in the context of having a circular economy strategy that could see us move to make sure our food supply chain is of the very highest quality, take steps right along that the chain - not just at the farming end - to ensure that the way we manage this crucially important sector for rural Ireland is to the very highest standard and ensure that Origin Green can genuinely stand up as a concept.

I was disappointed to see that Sinn Féin now seems to be playing footsie with the approach some have portrayed whereby we can have our cake and eat it. At the biodiversity committee, Sinn Féin was all for having a constitutional right to nature. However, its members have come in here and stated that they do not want a restoration law, or at least not yet. It is a case of "Make me virtuous Lord, but not yet".

The truth is that if we do not have a framework and a plan developed by the Minister of State and his colleagues, we will not deliver for Irish agriculture the approach that is needed to ensure sustainable production. I put it to the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, that his national biodiversity plan is a significant step forward. I welcome legal base underpinning the plan. I welcome that the Minister of State will now have a progress tracker and new indicators, and there will be better reporting. The targets are still vague, however. It is not entirely clear what the targets are from one year to the next. They are much more about engagement with various processes and the direction of travel rather than reaching specific targets. Equally, I am not yet convinced that we have the tools necessary to allow us to make the changes.

I can understand those colleagues representing farming constituencies who want to see some greater detail of the tools that will be available to drive some of the targets. One of the big strengths of agriculture in the debate on climate is that it is in the unique position of being able to not just reduce carbon emissions but also sequester carbon through good practices. It can be a very significant earner in the future for agriculture but we need to develop those processes that allows the position now to be benchmarked and for people to earn rewards for delivering that change. This presents statistical problems that we need to put our minds to and get people to work on.

On the reporting to this House, we still have not met the central ask of the citizens' assembly on biodiversity. We still do not have the central driver of how this is to be done and how it will be overseen within the Oireachtas. We need to think more about that process. One Minister of State acting on his own trying to push other Ministers to do it is not sufficient. This is why I see the merit in bringing many of our efforts, be they in respect of the circular economy or biodiversity, under the umbrella of the approach that is taken to the climate plan. They are interlocking challenges we face. Having strategies overseen from the Office of the Taoiseach gives much more momentum and focus and makes people much more responsible.

The other element that needs to be looked at carefully is enforcement. It is all very well to have good laws, but the citizens' assembly was quite critical of our capacity to enforce our existing laws.

I congratulate the Minister of State on the work he is doing. We will watch with interest his development of the national nature restoration plan, which will follow from the passage of the legislation in Europe. It will be a very important opportunity to start to shape the pathway for people and to prove to Deputies such as Deputy O'Donoghue, who spoke before me, that a credible pathway to prosperous farming is what the Minister of State is offering so that we can have nature conservation, sustainable food production and prosperous farming working hand in hand. This phoney war of pitching one against the other and pretending the Government and many of the other parties in the Opposition are selling farmers down the river is leading us in the wrong direction. We will not resolve the challenges that face Irish agriculture if it becomes this type of a Punch and Judy debate. Those who will lose out most from this direction will be the farming and rural communities themselves.

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