Serious questions have been raised by the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) in relation to the proposed Nature Restoration Law.
Speaking following a meeting of the Designated Areas Monitoring Committee at which the law was discussed, the deputy president of ICMSA, Denis Drennan, has expressed serious doubts regarding both the proposed law itself and the source of funding to apply it.
According to the association, the most notable features of the Nature Restoration Law are time-lined ‘restoration’ plans that will cover 20% of EU land and 20% of EU seas by 2050.
This also entails no less than 25,000km of rivers to be classified as free-flowing by 2030, according to ICMSA.
Nature Restoration Law
Drennan said: “In what will be an especially ambitious – not to say unrealistic – target for Ireland, the Nature Restoration Law stipulates 70% of drained peatlands to be restored by 2050.
The ICMSA representative added that people must grasp that these targets will be applied beyond state-owned land.
“This act will allow to government to insist that privately owned farmland is ‘restored’ to a commercially unproductive state,” Drennan said.
“It effectively gives the Irish state the right to tell farmers that all, or part, of their lands must now be turned over to some activity or non-activity that the Irish state decides it was doing before it was farmed.”
Drennan said that his organisation believes that it is crucial that a degree of feasibility and “basic legislative logistics” underpinned these kinds of plans.
He said that the committee could not conclude that enough attention had been given to the question of both the timelines, the funding, and critically, the economic and social impact on the farmers and communities concerned.
“The NPWS [National Parks and Wildlife Service] and the department [of Agriculture, Food and the Marine] itself, have both acknowledged that they have concerns with the proposed law; the timeframes for the targets and measures are extremely tight, bordering on impossible,” Drennan continued.
“But an even more fundamental question arises that ICMSA is not going to allow the government to dodge – who is going to decide which land is to be restored and on what basis?
“It is up to our government to ensure that the rights of individual farmers and their communities are recognised and, critically, built into the legislation when finalised.”
Funding
According to the ICMSA, the NPWS and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine also stated that there was no new money available to implement the new law.
“That means a CAP [Common Agricultural Policy] budget that is already completely inadequate and is being diminished in real terms on a daily basis is now going to be asked to cover all the expenses involved in the legally questionable compulsory ‘restoration’ measures for a whole fifth of the country,” Drennan continued.
“That’s not going to be possible and just even considering it or thinking about it is a waste of everyone’s time.”
The association has said that there are many fundamental questions which the government needs to consider and answer before it embarks on what it has called a “fool’s errand” in terms of the Nature Restoration Law.