Results 801-820 of 7,651 for speaker:Michael Fitzmaurice

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: I am asking this specific question. You have to look at all soils in the country. You have to look at peat soils, mineral soils and boggy soils. What is the definition of a healthy peat soil?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: I would not say you would be farming on that.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: You cannot be farming on a healthy peatland, because you would have had to rewet it. Do the witnesses not agree? If you want to go for annex 1 - and they are pretty familiar with it - how do you get there? The only way the national parks can do it at the moment under annex 1 is by rewetting in order to let sphagnum mosses grow. Is that right or wrong?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: I know that. That is one headache for us, but I am talking about mountains and lowland peat soils. Regardless of the peat soil, the directive is a carte blanche over all soils in the line of getting all of them healthy by 2050. Would the witnesses agree with that?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: That is the ambition. It is like the monitoring you have to do for the designated areas. Every four or five years, you have to get scientific stuff - is it poor, is it moderate, is it good? You then got a slap on the wrist from our good buddies in the European Court, to which you will be referred because you did not go in at favourable status. That is the way it works at the moment for...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: How can it be acceptable if our ambition is to have them all at favourable status?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: On a peat soil, for anyone who knows anything about it, the habitats directive had a 30-year span to try to get at that. In a lot of cases, it was not fit to do it in the context of annex 1. It obviously takes an awful lot of work and the only way there were able to try was by rewetting. Has a lidar system already been done on the soils of Ireland? I understood the Department was doing...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: Was the lidar done? The contract was supposed to be given out. We had a committee meeting here where the Department of agriculture stated it was going to. Northern Ireland was doing its own. We were advised at the time to make sure it was done on a 15 sq. m basis, and that it would check carbon as well as everything else. Was that ever done?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: Was it ever put out to tender?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: My other question is about soils and nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, NPK. Will it be affected that way?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: Tthe Department is compiling soil types in different areas of the country at the moment. Teagasc's figures and those of the EPA are totally different at the moment. They are compiling that at present. Let us take Listowel, County Kerry, because I know it fairly well. There are cows out in fields that were originally peat bog. How do you get those to favourable status?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: The nature restoration law has certain targets. What I am trying to establish is whether it is all soils in the country that are coming under this directive.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: We will stay with the example of Listowel and the Friesian cows in the field down there that has been shored, gravel tunnelled and had drains put around it. When we go back to our maps and look at what that field was used for at one time, we find it was where people used to cut turf, to put it simply. What is going to happen in this type of situation? Farmers need to know what is coming...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: In all fairness, it is not possible to meet the criteria for bog or peat land with fields that have shores in place every 7 yards, which the EU paid the farmers to do, and drains around the edges. It will not be possible to meet the peatland criteria for such land as it originally was 50 or 60 years ago.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: Sorry, but let us get one thing clear. I worked on this in the national parks for years. Active, raised bog cannot grow unless the land is rewetted. There is no in-between on that.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: Okay.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: Let us simplify this a bit. If the result for soil comes out the first day as poor, and something else might be medium and else something good, under this directive, does that poor rating have to be brought up to favourable status by 2050?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: Has anyone in the Department or a Minister stood back and looked at this? In fairness to the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, I know it is not the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine that has the lead on this issue. Am I right in saying it is the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and company in the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications taking the lead here?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: We are signing up to something here that down the road will bite us in the ass. If I lived in the Golden Vale, there would be no worries because of the soil type found there. It is different, though, if you live in Donegal, the west or the midlands and come from an area that has peaty soil. The same EU, as I said, gave grants for people to drain land. There is not a hope in God of...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (24 Jan 2024)

Michael Fitzmaurice: No, but we do not have to. I am talking about a regional context.