Representatives from environmental group An Taisce spoke before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine yesterday (Tuesday, April 4), where they had a tense exchange with independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice.
Fitzmaurice queried An Taisce on how farmers on peaty soils would “make a living” if farming on such soils was curtailed for environmental reasons.
In response, Ruaidhrí O’Boyle of An Taisce commented: “The clear evidence is that the living is not made from the farming of the uplands; the living is made through the subvention of direct payments.
“Nothing could be worse than the current situation for farmers in cattle and sheep farming, where their total income in the farming side is from direct payments.
“The direct payments have to subsidise the farm because the farm is not making any money for the farmer,” O’Boyle added.
He argued: “What they are currently doing, guided by the bodies that have influence over farmers, its not delivering for them. So the idea that if they keep doing what they’re doing, because we’ve done it for some time now, just doesn’t make any economic sense for the farmer.”
Roscommon-Galway TD Fitzmaurice then referenced An Taisce’s history of objecting to various types of developments and practices, including in the forestry, peat harvesting and turf cutting sectors.
On peat, the TD asked: “We are brining in peat for the mushroom industry. Do you agree with that, or should the mushroom industry be wiped out?”
In response, O’Boyle said: “It is not a binary choice. Civil society has pointed out for years, or decades, that we cannot continue to mine peat out of the ground, for whatever purpose.”
He added: “We’re now talking about carbon sequestration in terms of agriculture, and yet we’re still not talking about what remains the single biggest carbon storage in the country, which is our peatlands.
“Until we start protecting and restoring our peatlands, we’ll be dancing around the margins [of sequestration],” the An Taisce representative argued.
Commenting after yesterday’s meeting, Fitzmaurice called it “deeply unsatisfactory”.
“Finding out what An Taisce actually wants or stands for is like playing handball with a haystack, where each question just rolls back at you,” the deputy remarked.
“It appears opposed to everything from farming on peat soils to quarries, water development, one-off housing, housing estates, road building, forests and retrofitting,” Fitzmaurice claimed.
“It hardly makes rural Ireland an attractive place to live if we are, under this vision, to abandon every piece of progress since rural electrification.”
He continued: “The word sustainability has been turned into a stick to beat rural Ireland with. An Taisce likes the word very much. But it refuse to answer questions about how many sheep or cattle will be ‘sustainable’ in its Ireland.
“Rural Ireland is ablaze with concern over the consequences for our people of the Climate Action Plan. When it comes to the perspective of An Taisce, I and rural Ireland are still waiting for answers. It is not a scenario conducive to building trust,” Fitzmaurice concluded.