Paul Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, to the House for this Second Stage debate on the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021. I do not like having to do speak to people from behind and I would not like it to appear that I am speaking down on anybody because I am certainly not doing that. I am unable to change the lay-out of the Chamber or my allocated seat.

For obvious reasons, I will concentrate more on the agriculture aspects of this Bill than on the vast number of other areas it covers.While I welcome the extended role of the Climate Change Advisory Council, CCAC, and the additional numbers on the council, I would question its make-up from an agricultural perspective. It is well known that we did not have an industrial revolution and hence the agricultural sector, which is our largest indigenous industry, is our biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in percentage terms. The sector is very poorly represented on the CCAC and I urge the Minister to balance its representation if at all possible so that we can meet the targets that are to be set.

The previous speaker referred to his concerns about carbon budgets and sectoral emission ceilings, and I also have reservations. While I accept the necessity, importance and strength of this Bill in formulating a structure going forward, I am very much aware it will be the carbon budgets, the sectoral emissions ceilings and the climate change targets within each Department that will be the game changers in terms of enabling us to reach our targets. I am worried about how much input this Parliament will have into those targets and ceilings and I ask the Minister to elaborate on that. Will Ministers be answerable to the relevant Oireachtas joint committees? Will they put the recommendations from the CCAC on budgets and ceilings before the Parliament? I would like to hear a little more on that and would be a little fearful of Departments being given too much freedom in setting their targets and ambitions.

The Minister referred in his opening statement to front-loading some of the changes we are going to have to make, but I would strongly plead with him to consider back-ending a lot of what is needed in the agriculture sector. The development of technologies in agriculture and the scientific developments in that sector are way behind the curve in comparison with transport and energy production. I am a member of the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine and when we have climate-related debates, all of the witnesses who come before us tell us they are now commencing the search for alternatives and are beginning to embrace the technologies in which there is great potential. They do not have the technological alternatives or the scientific solutions to hand at the moment and I am very fearful that we are putting the cart before the horse. We must maintain food security. While a lot of the discussion today has been about Ireland becoming a leader rather than a laggard vis-à-visclimate change, we are already a world leader in food production and we must be careful not to bite off our nose to spite our face. We have to get this right. The population is growing and food production will have to increase. If we dramatically reduce our food production and get it wrong because we did not wait for the science or did not embrace the evolving science, we will regret it.

I attended a forum recently where a member of the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation, ICBF, made a very valid point. He said that if we could reduce the average age of slaughter of our cattle by one month, it would be the equivalent of reducing the overall herd by 100,000. That is something that needs to be embraced before we make any knee-jerk decisions. If food additives, different systems, genomics and better breeding are taken into account, it should be very achievable to reduce the average age of slaughter by one month, from 26 to 25 months or from 24 to 23 months. I would hate to see a decision being made that would not give us the opportunity to explore that possibility.

I would also like to agree with previous speakers who said the agriculture sector is meeting the challenges with open arms. We have seen the buy-in to the results-based environmental agri pilot, REAP, scheme. There were 10,000 applicants for a scheme designed for 2,000 participants. The agriculture sector is only too willing to meet the challenges and it has the solutions. Farmers are the custodians of the land.With our grass-fed system, some scientists will say we are storing 90 times our annual output in our soil, but we are not getting recognition for that. We do not get recognition for our hedgerows.

The two other matters I will mention in concluding are climate justice and just transition. If we are to bring the agriculture sector with us, and it will come with us, we must stop farmer bashing and do what climate justice and just transition say. We must give the sector recognition. One example of where we have not done that is carbon tax. It has been loaded onto farm contractors. Carbon tax is an incentive to make people change their habits. If one drives a diesel car, one will buy an electric car. However, the farm contractor drives a diesel tractor as there is no alternative, and is now being crippled by carbon tax. That is just sullying and souring the people. It is making it harder to bring them with us. They are becoming regressive rather than progressive.