The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) has said that the CAP budget is going to be asked to cover the expenses involved in restoration measures under the EU’s nature restoration law.

Speaking following a designated areas monitoring committee meeting with the Department of Agriculture, ICMSA deputy president Denis Drennan said that the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and the Department “stated that there was no new money available to implement the new law”.

“That means a CAP 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,” he said.

Drennan added this is not going to be possible and “just even considering it or thinking about it is a waste of everyone’s time".

Drennan said that even if additional funding was to be forthcoming, the very fundamental legal questions would have to be determined in advance of any further contemplation of the law.

Ambitious

The ICMSA said that 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, with no less than 25,000km of rivers to be classified as free-flowing by 2030”.

“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,” it said.

Drennan said that it is vital that all farmers grasp the fact that these targets will be applied beyond State-owned land.

“This act will allow Government to insist that privately-owned farmland is ‘restored’ to a commercially unproductive state; 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,” he said.

Feasibility

Drennan said that his organisation believes that it is crucial that a degree of feasibility and what he called “basic legislative logistics” underpinned these kinds of plans.

He said it was not possible, in the context of what the committee had heard, to conclude that enough attention had been given to the question of the timelines, the funding and, even more critically, the economic and social impact on the farmers and communities concerned.

“The NPWS and the Department 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.

“But an even more fundamental question arises that [the] 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.

"How are they going to reconcile a farmer’s right to his own property with this proposed right to tell him or her what they have to do with it?”

Land

Drennan questioned exactly whose land is going to be restored.

“Because if it’s the Government undertaking to restore its own land, then that’s their business.

"But if there’s any degree or question about the Government legislating or regulating on private property having to be ‘restored’, then that is an entirely different matter and one that is bound - and we guarantee it - to become a much more protracted and opposed infringement of the most basic rights set out in law.”