Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am from a farming background and all my family, and generations before me, were farmers. What the nature restoration law is doing to farmers, especially small farmers, is making bad land very expensive. If a farmer is farming every piece of a small landholding, with all the laws that are there whereby farmers need to have certain lands for biodiversity and everything else that comes with that, that puts farmers out of reach, so they have to try to change their farming and make themselves smaller, which makes them cease to be viable. Irish farmers, husbands and wives, farm the land, look after nature and put food on our tables. Every time the Government comes in with something, it makes that harder for them.

Food security will be so important for this country. We have seen how many wars have happened, and they are getting closer and closer and more and more frequent. We will rely on the farmers of this country to feed us. We look at emissions in this country and at our carbon footprint. We account for 0.0001% of the issue of global carbon emissions. If we take into account all the imports we are bringing in here to replace the sectors the Government has closed, they far exceed the level of carbon emissions produced here. The Government is imposing penalties on different people in this country to make a change, yet it allows other countries to raise their carbon emissions to provide for us. There needs to be some common sense when we are thinking about these laws.

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