Kilkenny’s Denis Drennan questions ‘Fool’s Errand’ Nature Restoration Law planning

Speaking following a meeting of the Designated Areas Monitoring Committee at which the Nature Restoration Law was discussed, Dunbell farmer and Deputy President of ICMSA, Denis Drennan, has expressed serious doubts regarding both the proposed law itself and the source of funding to apply it.

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 25,000 kms of rivers to be classified as free-flowing by 2030.
In what will be an especially ambitious target for Ireland, the Nature Restoration Law stipulates 70% of drained peatlands to be restored by 2050.

Mr Drennan said that it is vital that all grasp the fact 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; it effectively gives the Irish State to 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,” said Mr Drennan.

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

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“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 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.

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“There are many very fundamental questions that I strongly advise the Government to consider and answer before they embark on what I’m afraid is – as it stands now - a bit of a ‘Fool’s Errand’ in terms of the Nature Restoration Law,” concluded the ICMSA Deputy President.