Government ministers have been told that “the onus is on them” to explain the impact and the meaning of the EU Nature Restoration Law.
The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) said this afternoon (Tuesday, June 27) that it is “not up to farmers or other landowners to wonder aloud how this law would work, or work their way through the legal fog to an understanding”.
The organisation was reacting to this morning’s events in the European Parliament, in which MEPs of the environment committee rejected the Nature Restoration Law.
The committee could only manage a tied vote on whether or not to accept the law, meaning it will now recommend to the parliament as a whole that the law proposal be rejected.
Reacting to this, Pat McCormack, the ICMSA president, said that the rejection of the law by the committee is “an opportunity for a more balanced and workable proposal to be thought through”.
“The proposed law is wholly inadequate in terms of striking balance between individual rights and diktat… Matters have not been helped by differing voices within the Irish government on the degree of compulsion [versus] free choice that the law involves in a domestic context,” he said.
He said there was “official neglect” of the need to explain fully the implications and consequences to the law and “to take account of the genuine concerns of people rather than ignore them”.
The ICMSA president said that Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue, and Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications Eamon Ryan, must explain the full ramifications of the law to landowners.
“This is what ministers Ryan and McConalogue must understand… The onus is categorically on those supporting the Nature Restoration Law to explain and have ready all the answers to all the questions that arise from this incredibly radical and overturning of the most basis principle of individual rights,” McCormack said.
He added: “The exact same reservations that we expressed in Ireland were reflected all over the EU and that is why the environment committee rejected the Nature Restoration law.
“We are confident that the same obvious defects will ensure that the law will struggle in any plenary session of the European Parliament unless genuine concerns are recognised and addressed,” McCormack commented.