Farmers who turned ‘brown ground green’ should not have to rewet - Healy-Rae

It would be “complete nonsense” for farmers who previously drained fields to be forced to rewet them, Minister of State Michael Healy-Rae has said.

Speaking at an Agri Aware farm walk and talk at Salesian Agricultural College Pallaskenry on Friday 28 February, Minister Healy-Rae stated that farmers who worked hard to make land productive should not be compelled to return it to its original condition.

“I’ll never be two-faced about what I say, I’ve said it before in the Dáil, a person that worked hard and that broke bones maybe to drain land, to turn brown ground to green, for them to have to do the opposite would be just something that I couldn’t get my head around.

“It would be complete nonsense to me. It wouldn’t be right or it wouldn’t be fair to ask somebody to do that,” he added.

Meeting

The minister was responding to questions from the Irish Farmers Journal about a Department of Agriculture meeting on how to reduce the management intensity of 80,000ha of Ireland’s effectively drained peat farmland by 2030. No farm organisations were invited to the closed-door meeting.

“I wasn’t at that meeting myself where the rewetting was discussed. My understanding of the whole rewetting situation is, anything that will happen to farmers will be completely voluntary.

“In other words, that nobody is going to be forced to do anything that they don’t want to do. This State owns an awful lot of land that they can put to that purpose themselves and that there will be no adverse effect on individual farmers.

“That’s my understanding, that’s in the Programme for Government, it’s clearly stated in documents and I would really look forward to that being the case,” he said.

Voluntary

The Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, whose brief includes farm safety, forestry and horticulture, added that the only situation where farmers’ land should be rewet is if it is voluntary.

“The only way I could see it being workable is that if it was under consent. In other words, that the farmers wanted to do it and that they were being adequately and properly compensated for doing that.

“Again, a person that worked hard to drain land and to make it green, for them to be forced to turn that back, that just does not make sense to me. I have been very honest and very open about that.

“I’m very conscious that we have to comply, we have targets to meet and everything like that, but I will again say what I’m just after saying to you,” he stated.

Agri Aware is hosting a series of farm walk and talk events for secondary school students around the country over the coming weeks.