Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the nature fund. Luckily for Irish farmers, the nature restoration law is being opposed because it has not been thought out. It is a damnable day, one I never thought I would see, that I would be thanking someone in Italy, Poland or, I think, Türkiye or wherever that Orbán fella is, for not supporting the nature restoration law being applied. Ironically enough, the farming organisations in this country made clear what they think about it. The problem is that they are not being listened to.

I do not mind what the State does with its land. I never did. That is up to the State because it owns its land.

8 o’clock

For farming communities, that would basically have made small farmers viable. We have to be very careful that we keep them going. No more than in the Ceann Comhairle's area, there are small communities that make up what we call a meitheal. We cannot have legislation like that coming in. We can throw money at things. I remember people talking about the bog situation through the years. People would say to me that they were being offered money. If money solved every problem, it would not be a problem. It is as simple as that. However, there are traditions and communities. There could be a nature fund and, in fairness, there is talk about that. However, it is not the individual who gets it. When I look at a community, I have to look around the whole room. If somewhere is rewetted, I do not have to get up in the morning and go out suckling a few calves or counting cattle, so I can live anywhere I want. My kids would not have to go to the school down the road. I would not have to go into the shopkeeper or merchant I buy nuts or get a drop of diesel or petrol from - we are not gone electric yet. We can say that we would look after Johnny, Mary or whoever, and we probably would. However, the outlying consequences of trying to keep what I would call a rural community going are what we have to make sure of.

In fairness to the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, there is ACRES and he has brought in what is basically ACRES 2, which I welcome. That is a decision for people to make. I would love it if there was a second suckler cow scheme because, unfortunately, we are losing them by the week. In my opinion, we need to start balancing this debate for the simple reason that we need to assess how much carbon the land, the barley, the trees and all the different things take in. We need to look at what farmers want to do. I spoke to a farmer the other day who said he was going to plant a hectare but he was told that he cannot. I asked him why and he said it was because the new EU rules are that there cannot be a depth of peat of more than 30 cm, or it is over. This is where we have to make sure we do things right.

If we want to talk about doing things differently for water quality, we should talk about anaerobic digesters, which are a very good thing. The biggest problem at the moment is that there is talk about them being used with silage, maize or whatever can be put into them. Obviously, every city and large town in the country needs this help for the simple reason that electricity can be produced from the sludge that Irish Water has, but it has to go somewhere as well. Even at the water treatment plants, when water is treated, there is a certain amount of what we call sludge, which is made into digestate. However, the right hand does not know what the left is doing. The Minister, Deputy Ryan, is talking about giving €3 million, which would hardly do the foundations of one of them. It costs €20 million to build an anaerobic digester, and that is not a big one. People have to get a feed-in tariff, as was done in the North, although maybe we would not do it the same way they did it, given the heating scheme issues they had. Nonetheless, there would need to be a 7, 9 or 11 cent feed-in tariff per kilowatt hour, depending on the size of the anaerobic digester.

Then we hit the big problem. What is the big problem? I was talking to the chair-designate of Bord Bia this evening. In every country in Europe, even those with equivalent bodies to Bord Bia, people can spread digestate, which will reduce the use of fertiliser and it can also be put into gas or used to create electricity. One would imagine that is a fairly good story to be telling. I spoke to the people in Teagasc who research this and they do not have a problem. I spoke to people in the Department of agriculture and, in fairness, they do not have a problem. However, Bord Bia said that, no, it could not do that. That little thing is stopping us from doing this.

At the moment, thankfully, we have PGI status and some of this funding will be going into things like anaerobic digesters. If we want to try to bring people with us, I would be in favour of a system where someone would come to take a farmer’s slurry, bring it to an anaerobic digester and make gas or electricity from it or bring it back in pellet form. Happy days. Great job. Unfortunately, that is not happening because the amount of funding put into this is, first, not there and, second, we do not seem to have a direction as to where we are going with all of this. Germany is where we would learn about this. It would be doing good for water quality and the environment. We have lovely headings as to what we are going to do but, sometimes, if we just concentrated on one thing and actually carried it out, we would be a lot better off. I ask the Government to look at where it is putting this funding. It should bear in mind what I have said. An anaerobic digester costs €20 million but if we look at what is in the budget, that will tell us that while we talk about it, we are not serious about doing it.

As I said earlier, I thank the Minister for putting out the second ACRES. I remember being told that the carbon tax would be shoved onto farming. Off the top of my head, and I am open to correction, I think it was said that we would get €623 million a year and something like €123 million would go to the agricultural side, split up between different things. If we are taking it off people, we should give it back to them. I do not agree with the carbon tax personally because I think it is a bad tax for ordinary people but we should make sure that we reward people. While there are 54,000 or 55,000 in the scheme, which is good and is about 7,000 or 8,000 more than the last scheme, if we can get 70,000 into it, we should be opening the doors and doing that. If farmers want to go into it, we should be encouraging them.

I am all in favour of this. As I said, if the State wants to basically rewet its own types of land, it should do that. However, people should have a look at the newspapers or the news on the television from the last few days. Coillte came into the agriculture committee and told us it has 30,000 ha of forestry on peaty ground that it was going to cut down and then rewet the ground. It looked lovely. That was going to be the solution instead of looking at some farmer somewhere. I do not know enough about it and Deputy Connolly might know more than I do because it was to be in her area. However, when it applied to cut and then restore this area, it was refused. Does the right hand know what the left is doing? As I said, I do not know all the ins and outs of it, and I am not saying anything about the council that refused this as it may have very valid reasons. However, if that is what is going on around the country, we will be talking about doing things forever but we will never end up doing them. That is my big worry in all of this. I again thank the Ceann Comhairle for giving me the opportunity to speak.

See this speech in context