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

There has been so much scaremongering about the nature restoration law over the past couple of years that you would have thought it is a powerful law that will drive farmers off their land. The truth is it is anything but. We have another EU proposal that has been gutted again and again by right wing parties in Europe, egged on by the big agribusiness and big farmer lobby. To top it off, it has not even been passed by the Council of Ministers yet and, given the swing to the right in the European elections, it is questionable whether it will be passed at all or gutted even further before being passed. Even if it is passed, member states will have wide latitude in implementing it. We all know what that looks like in practice from how this State implements EU environmental directives. It does not implement them, and we have the fines and court cases to prove it. In this context, the motion is really an attempt to kill off the nature restoration law entirely while giving words of kindness and words in the right direction. It is akin to pulling the plug on a patient on life support.

The dire situation of nature and biodiversity in this country has been endlessly recited inside and outside of this Chamber but still very little is being done about it. The Government acknowledged in its sixth national report to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2019 that 91% of listed habitats had an unfavourable conservation status, with 31% of them declining even further. Overall, around half of habitats were declining in quality. BirdWatch Ireland reported in 2022 that almost two thirds of Ireland's bird species are in serious trouble. We have loads of excellent proposals from the Citizens' Assembly on Biodiversity Loss and the Children and Young People's Assembly on Biodiversity Loss. I sit on the environment committee, which reviewed and endorsed those reports. We have a national biodiversity action plan which now has a statutory basis, but it still seems the Government will not take action on the biggest threats to biodiversity.

This morning I heard on the radio that the EPA published its latest report on water quality. It shows there has been no improvement. By some measures it is getting worse. Water quality is improving in 187 water bodies and declining in 232 others. Only 15% of our water bodies have high-quality status, while 45% are substandard. Four rivers and 11 lakes are rated bad, which means that, like Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, they are ecological disaster zones. What is the cause of this ecological disaster, this ecocide being wreaked on our society? Primarily, it is caused by industrial agriculture overstocking the land and having to use huge amounts of artificial fertiliser as a result, and by the failure to invest in proper sewage and water treatment facilities. Rather than tackling either of those issues, the Government is promising to defend the nitrates derogation to its inevitable death. It refuses to tell the truth to farmers and squirrels away billions in so-called rainy day funds rather than investing some of the €65 billion surplus in essential sewage and water treatment infrastructure.

One proposal that both the Citizens' Assembly on Biodiversity Loss and the Oireachtas environment committee have supported is for a referendum to insert the rights of nature and of people to a healthy environment into the Constitution. This is supposed to be looked at by the Government but in reality it seems it will play for time and kick the can down the road until the next general election.

One area where we can agree with the Regional Group is that there needs to be proper funding provided along with the nature restoration law so that farmers are properly rewarded for restoring nature and their livelihoods are protected. The Government has the money to do this at national level regardless of what happens at European level. It should make a cast-iron commitment that no small farmer will lose out financially as a result of action for nature restoration. There should be a commitment in our national restoration plan to distribute income in the farming sector away from big farmers and the agrifood industry and towards small farmers. That needs to happen at European level and in Ireland if there is to be a just transition towards sustainable farming that ensures food security, enhances biodiversity and reduces carbon emissions.

For those reasons, we in People Before Profit supports a stronger nature restoration law at European level that is fully implemented nationally, but we need to go beyond that. We need to make the kind of transformative eco-socialist changes that will end the climate and biodiversity crises. That means breaking from industrial, for-profit agriculture entirely and moving towards an eco-socialist system that produces food for people, not for profit, and that has protection and stewardship of the land at its core. As long as capitalism remains dominant in our agricultural and economic system, not even our rivers will run free.

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