Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senators for their contributions. I signal in advance that I intend to accept amendments Nos. 1 and 92. I do so because, as I said in earlier debates on Second Stage in the Dáil, I believe the Bill already provides that we want to encourage the use of sinks of greenhouse gases and carbon, and this was our clear intention. The amendments strengthen this and give clarity on it. As Senator Paul Daly said, the amendments complement each other and they are not contradictory.

I ask for time to respond because there have been many contributions and this is a critical issue. I want to explain some of the thinking on this. Senator Lombard started with reference to Courtmacsherry. I remember more than two years ago we spent a day or two talking to farmers in the brilliant Barryroe Co-operative, which does a really good job in the proud tradition of small co-operatives in west Cork. Carbery has had huge success with a massive expansion of exports. It was good to spend that time there. It has a place in my heart because my wedding reception was down the road. I love that place.

I have a couple of thoughts on the back of it, to take it as a specific example. It probably has some of the best dairy land in the world where the grass grows almost all year round. It has very good soil. Many of the farmers there I spoke to had just come out of the 2018 drought and had really suffered. The grass had stopped growing because it was burned to the core. Many of them realised, if they were honest, looking back at the newspapers at that time, that they were overstocked, that they were too tight and borrowed up, and at risk and exposed because of the climate changing, with dairy being affected as much as anything else. I remember at the time many farming people saying I was right and that we have to begin to protect ourselves from this climate change. There are ways we can do this. There is mixed sward grass management with very deep-rooted grass that will survive drought better. It improves animal health and other outcomes. We can have clover nitrogen fixing in the mix. Soil and grass management is not easy. This is where the smart farmers are going. I listened to them and this is what they are working at. Our best farmers are going in that direction.

I cannot think of Courtmac without also acknowledging and recognising what the EPA gave me recently as an example. We have a major problem in Courtmac with the pollution of the waterways. It is an incredibly important special protection area habitat with huge bird life in the estuary. It is seriously and serially polluted. Pollution is a real problem in the area. It is not uncommon elsewhere. It was very interesting reading in the newspapers the day before yesterday about a report published by the EPA acknowledging that we have a serious nitrogen, ammonia and phosphate pollution problem in our country.What did the report say? It said that the three sisters, those rivers in the south east, are saturated with nitrogen.

I mention my neck of the woods in Dublin Bay and I walk around the Irishtown Nature Park in Poolbeg. It is a stunning place and a beautiful beach but most summers you are walking through algae rather than sand because the Liffey captures all the excess nitrogen phosphates we have from the midlands and washes them out into Dublin Bay. Dubliner cheese is much appreciated and loved around the world but Dubliners do not particularly want to be walking through algae sludge on their bay and in their beach. At some point they will ask where the pollution is coming from and how it can be stopped. We will stop it and we will protect all of our environment. As Senator Boyhan said, every place and person matters and that issue matters.

Carbery Group is superb with huge exporting and marketing success and is able to switch production into cheese and other products. One thing is clear to me; we will not be able to do that unless we are origin green in everything we do. I met representatives of one of the big international food companies recently. They told me it had just done a bit of research on international trends in markets in China, India, America, South America and elsewhere. The message coming back was that on the dairy side in particular, customers are starting to ask questions and to be concerned about the origin and environmental impact of dairy products. That is happening. It is not just about climate; it is also about the biodiversity issues. The Irish farming community and industry need to know this and they know it. The industry must know it because decisions in the financial markets are increasingly being taken with this knowledge in mind. The ability to raise finance and go out into a market and sell if you are not compliant in environmental standards will become an increasing issue.

I want to make a couple of other points in accepting these amendments. The Bill provides a real opportunity and I might go into that in a bit more detail. Allowing for the removals does not remove the need to reduce emissions. What Senator Lombard and other Senators have said is true. All of the attention is on agriculture and the shaming and blaming have to stop. That is the worst thing because it is not appropriate or right at all. However, what the Senator says is true. Agriculture will not be the most difficult sector to change. Maybe I am biased in that regard because I am the Minister for Transport and I am scratching my head every day thinking how in God's name we will change transport. We do not have the removals capability in transport that there is in agriculture. We are wedded to the existing transport infrastructure and it will be difficult to change.

That means agriculture also has to play its part in real emissions reductions, not just removals and sequestration. That has to be abundantly clear. I could not get on better with the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy McConalogue. I find him the most capable and decent colleague and he is good to work with but we will have to sit down in the coming weeks and months and strike a good balance between emissions reductions and removals. It will have to be both. For the sake of Irish agriculture and farming, there have to be real and significant emissions reductions or else we will get caught in the cross hairs as the world starts to look at what is happening in Canada, for example, with people dropping dead from the heat. Any sector that is seen to be part of the problem and not part of the solution is going to be in real trouble and we do not want to be in that place. There has to be a reduction in methane, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and ammonia pollution. All the various pollutants we have are a problem. This is not blaming in any way; it is just facing that reality because if we do not do so, we will be on the wrong end of the way global economies and markets are going.

Accepting these amendments helps to clarify what was already in the Bill, as was said. They open up real opportunities. I have heard the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Senator Hackett, speak about this and we are about to deliver these new riparian agroforestry type solutions. That will not just be along rivers but along river courses because we can stop some of the pollutants that way by planting clever strips of forestry without all the regulations and restrictions making it so difficult. Let us give farmers an incentive to be flexible, do this well and start putting new forest systems within our land in combination with farming, rather than switching away from farming. They should get recognition for the carbon that will be stored due to those efforts.

Energy will be slightly difficult on the land but we will be doing anaerobic digestion. We will have to do it in a sophisticated way. Farms working together will work best in this way because the scale will not work for the ordinary sized family farm. It will work with 12, 15 or 20 farmers working on a parish basis and coming together with some, for example, putting dry matter into the anaerobic digester and some feeding cattle or sheep. The slurry from that will feed the anaerobic digester as well so we will be managing a waste problem.

We do not want a massive expansion in new food production systems just to feed this ever-expanding system. Our marketing strategy is clear. We cannot have big increases in production because our land cannot take that. That is a fundamental reality that the food and production companies have to start realising. That model of ever-increasing production will not be the way. It has to be marketed as a niche, high-quality and high-priced product. That form of anaerobic digestion cannot be just pushing yet more fertiliser onto yet more grass with more slurry from pig and poultry production which will be increased further. That would involve everything increasing and the land and water quality taking the hit. That will not work. We can do anaerobic digestion where it involves waste management as well as land management and where it gets a good price to the farmer. It is all about getting an income to our Irish farmers. That is what we need to do and we can do that.

We will have to reduce nitrogen fertiliser use. This is a critical issue. Some of the mixed sward and the use of clover will provide nitrogen fixing in a much better and cheaper way. In a world of climate change, we cannot keep using fossil fuels without regard to the future, not to mention the issue of water quality that I mentioned earlier.

We will do a lot of rewetting in particular. There are certain areas in different parts of the country that will have different circumstances in this. There will even be different parcels on individual farms involved in this. It is the detailed and skilled management of the land with local knowledge that farmers have that will decide which grasslands we will rewet. There is a huge potential for storage of carbon and a huge income potential in that rewetting of grasslands. Some farms will be doing that more than others. It will be more of the north and the west getting the money if I am truthful and without creating a geographical divide. We know this. Senator Dooley's neighbours might be the ones who benefit more because they will have more of that type of storage potential on rewetted land. What Deputy Danny Healy-Rae and others have said is true. He said in a committee a few years ago that farmers have been told for 50 years that they have to drain land and now they are being told to wet it. That will be the case but they will be getting paid for it because it is bringing back biodiversity as well as storing carbon.

I refer to the mechanisms. The first key mechanism is land-use planning and review, which we are doing, and it will take time. What Senator Higgins says is right. We follow science on this and it will take time. To answer her question, we follow UN measurement systems. It has to be based on land use, land-use change and forestry, LULUCF, and on science. It will take us time to get the granular details we will need to be able to get the income streams to support some of this. That is what this is about. As well as protecting nature, it is about providing incomes into the future for these nature-based solutions. It will be based on measurement systems from the UN and on science. It will take us a few years to get the land-use planning right to make sure this is done on a scientific and a fair basis.

The second mechanism is the policy instruments to deliver. Again this will be in a few years time; it will not be immediate. We should follow the type of emissions trading system, ETS, that they have in New Zealand and other countries where there is a payment and a market for this.It is not just for biomethane, but for carbon as well. We can look at the various emissions, nitrous oxide, and so on. That is complex and why it takes a bit of time to get it done right. We need to give people time to prepare and set it up. The ETS type of system is the policy instrument that will help to deliver the income into farmers. This is what we are about; reduce emissions, increase income.

Someone referred to CAP, I cannot recall who. CAP will be of critical importance to get the details in terms of payments in Pillars 1 and 2, how these new eco-schemes are going to match this and back this up. From my understanding of the negotiations - the dialogue of which have only finished with the details yet to emerge and to be agreed nationally - the European rules now allow payments for rewetting, which they previously did not. We could get European money for some of the work I was speaking about a few minutes ago, among a variety of different ways. It is for all those reasons that we are accepting the two amendments. I thank the Senators for putting them forward.