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The agenda for today is a discussion on land availability. This is a fairly thorny issue, as we know from recent years and from our history. As well as availability, the question of land use and whether it will be available for food production and other sources is a big issue for people. Joining us from the Irish Land Observatory Stakeholder Group are: Mr. Daniel Long, co-founder ; Dr. Conor McCabe, Dublin City University; Dr. Alan Moore; Hedgerows Ireland; Dr. Mary Curtin, assistant professor in accounting and finance at the University of Limerick, UL; Mr. Donal Sheehan, dairy farmer, and Councillor Eddie Mitchell from Leitrim. They are all very welcome. In addition to their opening statements, the witnesses have provided briefing notes that have been circulated to members. I will allow five minutes for Mr. Long to read the opening statement. We will then proceed to questions and answers with members.

I thank the Chair and members of the committee for the opportunity to speak with them today. The question I find myself asking is one which, I suspect, is shared by many of us here, namely what kind of farming landscape are we leaving for the next generation. This is a question that follows me everywhere, from meetings with farmers in rural areas to discussions with colleagues and experts across Europe. In fairness, it is not unique to us. Almost every member state is grappling with the same challenges: ageing farm populations; growing pressure on land; and an unsettling lack of clear information about what is really happening beneath the surface.

I am joined today by a number of witnesses who represent a breadth of experience – active farmers, academic researchers, and representatives of farm groups. We also bring an international perspective, informed by engagement with colleagues and institutions across Europe. Collectively, we hope to illustrate both the urgency of this issue and the opportunity that a European land observatory presents for Ireland. Last July, the European Commission recognised the need in this area when it proposed a pilot land observatory. I had the privilege of leading a group to Brussels at that time to meet with officials from DG AGRI. There was a real sense of openness and willingness to explore what such a system could achieve. Ireland has an opportunity not only to support the initiative, but to help shape it and, perhaps, even host or trial elements of it here. At its core, a land observatory would finally give access to the kind of independent, trusted data that we currently lack. Questions that seem simple, such as "Who owns the land?", "How much remains in family farms?" and "How quickly is ownership consolidating?" are the ones that we cannot answer with confidence.

Across Europe, governments are making policy in an information vacuum. An effective Land Observatory could change that. By gathering, analysing, and publishing credible data on a regular quarterly basis, it could feed directly into agricultural, energy, and rural development policy. It could act as a vehicle for collaboration, rather than another source of disagreement. The observatory could provide neutral ground, a shared set of facts, allowing farmers, policymakers, and environmental stakeholders to discuss land use on the basis of evidence as opposed to speculation or ideology.

When we talk about land consolidation, it is too easy to focus solely on ownership. The reality is more complex. Control of land now extends far beyond who holds the freehold. Pressure on land leases is growing rapidly, particularly from energy sectors such as solar, wind and biogas. These industries, while essential to our climate ambitions, are also extremely land hungry. In some cases, productive agricultural land is being tied up in long-term leases, which, effectively, removes it from the farming pool for decades. Even without outright sale, we see a new form of consolidation that restricts land mobility and further limits opportunities for young farmers to get established taking shape. A robust, transparent data system would allow us to track those patterns in real time. It could help identify the balance between agricultural, environmental and energy needs, ensuring that renewable expansion and food security remain in harmony rather than in competition. Beyond that, an observatory could support smart, sustainable land use. By mapping soil type, water quality, elevation, and biodiversity, it can guide what types of farming or restoration should take place and where. The alignment of land type to land use would improve productivity, environmental outcomes, and rural planning all at once.

Industry, Members of these Houses and the general public often use the term "family farm" extremely liberally, and frequently in the absence of a full understanding of what differentiates a family farm from an industrial farm. The family farm is the bedrock of our food system. I am not here to make friends; I am here to highlight the point that another key working area of the land observatory could be to start the work to define a family farm and support that model. From a legal perspective, and informed by our counsel, we have taken the view that if property rights are in society's interest, then property obligations are for the common good. The common good demands responsible stewardship, not extraction, and the performance of obligations must be monitored by the authorities. This is one perspective; it underscores the need for clear definitions and oversight to safeguard family farming for future generations.

We can learn from our neighbours. France has operated its SAFER model since the 1960s. The latter is a system that monitors and, when necessary, intervenes to prevent excessive concentration of land ownership. Introducing such an instrument in Ireland would undoubtedly result in concerns, particularly regarding property rights and market interference, but the principle it represents, namely transparency and balance, is worth studying. Notably, the Scottish Government has already begun considering SAFER as a model for reform.

I want to stress one point. None of this is about creating another layer of bureaucracy or control. It is about building trust and transparency. The land observatory would not dictate who can buy, lease or farm land, but it would ensure that everyone, from the Government to the farmer and citizens could make decisions based on shared, independent data. That could lower tensions and enable consensus in areas where there is confusion or mistrust at present.

We are at a critical crossroads. The direction we choose will determine whether Europe's agricultural identity continues to be rooted in family farms and community-based production or shifts toward large-scale, corporate-style holdings that prioritise returns over resilience. A European land observatory that is designed collaboratively, informed by independence and grounded in trust can help chart the right path. It can guide our policy, strengthen our rural economy and ensure that Ireland's voice leads in shaping how Europe understands and manages its most precious resource - the land itself. I thank members. We look forward to their questions.

Two briefing documents have been circulated to members. One is from Donal Sheehan about his situation and buying the land beside his. Another document was circulated, which is a dataset. I will open the meeting to members. The first person offering is Deputy Kenny. Members will have eight minutes each.

I thank the witnesses for their opening statement. This is an issue that comes up in every part of the country. If we step back and look at it from a very basic perspective, it is about who profits from the land and how it benefits society as a whole. The community is very much a part of that. In the part of the world where I live in County Leitrim, we have huge amounts of land that have been given over to forestry. Afforestation has resulted in a big difficulty in that whole communities have been wiped out. Farms have disappeared. Then townlands and, before long, large parts of parishes also disappear. This leads to schools closing and football clubs no longer being able to function. Finally, there is nobody left to farm. Even for those who are farming, the services that they need are being withdrawn because of scarcity. When forestry is planted on a farm, nobody is needed to paint a shed, buy a gate or there is no need for a vet. It has a huge impact. That is one aspect of land use.

The other aspect goes a little deeper. We have had issues with minerals and mineral rights in parts of the country. We are very aware of those matters in Leitrim. Fracking was a big issue in the context of gas. Most recently, we had issues around exploration for mining rights, including in respect of gold of all things. We did not think we had any of it, but it seems that there is a possibility that we do.

That is one aspect of it.

The other aspect, to come to Mr. Sheehan's point in regard to farming, which I see as well, is that the larger operators, not so much in Leitrim but in some areas with more profitable sectors, namely, dairying, are buying up and leasing land, meaning nobody else can compete. That also becomes a difficulty and leads us to the stage where, as the Irish Land Observatory Stakeholder Group mentioned, we are moving towards industrial farming. Large dairy farms obviously get into debt to get into that position and if that indebtedness causes a problem, there will be a corporate takeover. Will we see the buyers of the milk, the processing company, become the owners of the land as well? If so, it becomes a corporate entity from start to finish, rather than a family farm.

This committee has often spoken about the way in which Irish food is marketed around the world, as coming from free roaming animals that are grass fed on family farms. That is how Irish food is marketed but that has to be authentic or else we are banjaxed. That is my view.

The concept of the observatory is one thing. Other farmers have talked to me about the need to go back to the old Land Commission, which had control over land. I would like to hear the witnesses' views on that. How do they see the future? How do we protect the family farm model?

The Deputy mentioned the Land Commission. The Land Commission, while it was effective, became outdated in term of the types of farms it saw as being sustainable. It did not move with the times. Many elements of the commission were restrictive on people's property rights and selling and maximising what they could get for land. What we propose with the land observatory, in its first iteration, is that it would be a data-gathering body that would be open to the general public, but would have trusted data. It would be data for researchers who are deciding what we should do on land use policies and for politicians, such as the committee members, who are discuss issue with farmers on the ground. It would have a trusted set of data. At the moment, a lot of the data on land is skewed and siloed. It is not together in one place. The Irish Farmers' Journal publishes data on land sales every year that comes from the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, which is primarily auctioneers. That is only capturing about 20% of the data. Dr. McCabe will speak more to that.

The other place where we can find data is the Central Statistics Office. We have figures there as well, which show that we have lost 6,400 farmers since 2013. That figure is from a different set of data. We do not have very much joined-up thinking when it comes to this. I must stress the point that this problem is not unique to Ireland. We see it in other parts of Europe, which are a number of years ahead of us. They and are looking for ways to address the problem. This is why the European Commission has put forward the land observatory. The main reason France established SAFER was to try to address these issues.

Solar farms are another big issue. A lot of them are located in parts of the country that would be considered to have very good and productive land. Does Mr. Long expect the Government, the State or somebody else to impose some control on where things can go in a broad sense? While we cannot infringe on property rights, because they are enshrined in the Constitution, where or how can we get a handle on this? I understand that getting the proper data is important but if the land observatory is just going to watch things and set out the data, where will the teeth come from to ensure we protect stuff?

To go back to my original point, we do not want to bring it all in at once. If we bring in something that will infringe on people's ability to sell land and maximise the value of their properties, it would not sit very well in Ireland due to our relationship with land. This is, however, very much an aspect of SAFER, which can step in if there is excessive consolidation taking place and it segregates land into land type. This needs to be gradual. We are working in a complete absence of data, so we need a starting point. A lot of the decisions we are taking around land are based on assumptions, not data.

Deputy Kenny spoke about forestry. This idea of private property rights is very important. In Ireland, we remember the landlords. When we wrote our Constitution we did not provide that Article 45 could be implemented through the courts but what it states is very important. It states, among other things, "That the ownership and control of the material resources of the community may be so distributed amongst private individuals and the various classes as best to subserve the common good." That is important. It continues: "That, especially, the operation of free competition shall not be allowed so to develop as to result in the concentration of the ownership or control of essential commodities in a few individuals to the common detriment." The Constitution clearly states that we have to be careful about land, it being one of the most important resources in the community, going into concentrated ownership contrary to the common good.

The Constitution further states: "That there may be established on the land in economic security as many families as in the circumstances shall be practicable." This is a statement that we have to try to keep as many people as possible on the land. The authors were familiar with what happened during the Famine and while they did want people on holdings that were not sustainable, they wanted to keep people on the land. We cannot have those objectives of maintaining the family farm and keeping people on the land unless we actually know who owns the land and who is on the land and at the moment we do not know. The biggest role that we have is to establish that data.

The Deputy mentioned the problems with forestry. We do not know who owns forestry. I am familiar with County Leitrim, so I will very quickly-----

I ask Mr. Mitchell to be brief.

I will be brief. Deputy Kenny is interested in this as well. We started to plant a lot of land in County Leitrim during the 1980s. Initially it was done by Coillte and a lot of that land is still in public ownership. However, we have seen 5,000 ha leave Coillte. Who owns that land? Where is it and who will control it in the future? When we think of mining and various other interests, if they own that land, what will they do with it? In the mid-1980s, we started to plant large quantities of private land. We have looked at that and we see that some of that was planted by local people and some of it was planted by people from outside of Leitrim. Those people benefited from public money that helped with fencing and putting in roads. All of that happened. Then they were given money for maybe 15 or 20 years to offset the income they had previously got from that land. That land was no good to them until it was mature, however, so for a period of 20 to 35 years, that land was not able to support people who had planted land for their retirement.

I need to move on to Senator Daly. There will be an opportunity to come back in again.

I had not heard of the Irish Land Observatory Stakeholder Group until the committee discussed holding this meeting. Will its members explain, for my information, who the group is, who brought it together and who manages it? Other than the accumulation of information, what is its role and does it have an "in" with the Government, Departments and the State?

In answering that first question about the land observatory's role, how does SAFER work or how would it be policed? I am getting closer to retiring. I have a small farm. If I were to put it on the market in the morning with a view to securing my future, and Deputy Kenny was prepared to give me €18,000 per acre to farm it and Senator Lynch was prepared to give me €25,000 per acre to put a solar farm on the land, it is obvious what I would do. Who would stop me? If I was stopped and I had to take the €18,000 offer, who would compensate me? How would that work? Do not get me wrong, but it is easy to say all this in theory. I have farmed all my life, as have my family, and I am an advocate for food production.

However, in that scenario, with twilight on the horizon, I am going to take the best offer and if it is solar then so be it. How do we square the circle? I am on the same side as the group but I am playing devil's advocate here. I know a lot about property rights. My father left school when he was 13 to farm. He turned bad land into good and he bought three farms in his lifetime. I went to build a house in 1995 and I was not given planning permission on our own land, unless I moved to somewhere else on our own land. Two years later, somebody drew a line with a pencil from Dublin to Galway to build the M6. It went through our land and we lost 18 acres with 14 isolated on the far side. To his grave my father was asking the question: did we own the land at all? We could not do what we wanted to do one day but a road could be built the next day. Mr. Mitchell might explain property rights to me. There are CPOs and a lot of other things we can do. I will give the witnesses the time rather than me taking it. Perhaps they can explain who they are first and then how they would see the SAFER thing being policed, managed and worked.

Regarding who we are, we came together as a group in 2024 because of a shared interest. Where I am from in Tipperary there is a lot of consolidation with a lot of big operators of buying up a lot of land. Essentially, it was a number of people who had a shared interest. We called an informal meeting and invited people who had an interest in consolidation. We knew that in the land-use policy and the land-use review an observatory was mentioned. Through our conversation we knew that other countries were looking at this, so we came together very loosely. We did not want to set up another organisation to rival other farm organisations. It was very much that we wanted to bring together a lot of the knowledge that was around. We put an open call out and there was a lot of interest from academia, farmers on the ground, and the general public around understanding our land-use policy.

It is really a representative group of like-minded people who recognised the issues involved.

Yes, like-minded people. We consolidated ourselves. There is a group in Europe called Access to Land Europe, which is quite vocal and it deals directly with the European Commission on land-use policy. It is quite vocal on a European land observatory. Ireland had no representation for Access to Land in Ireland, so we registered a group with Access to Land Europe. That is how we link in on a European level.

Are there any link-ins on a domestic level with the Department or Government?

We have not attempted to go into the Department. We have written to the Department and engaged with it informally. We have also engaged with the farm organisations informally. A lot of the representative groups of the farm organisations are represented in Europe. For example, Macra na Feirme is represented by CEJA in Europe and it is very much in favour of a land observatory. This organisation represents young farmers. As I said, we have had discussions with most of the farm organisations on this.

On the Senator's point about the value of land, there might be other colleagues who would speak on that. The Senator makes a very valid point that if a person has land to sell, they are entitled to maximise the value of that land. I cannot see a situation where there would be a mechanism where someone could step in and infringe a person's right to maximise the value of their land. However, we need to remember there is a social responsibility here as well as an economic one. Do we want a situation where the value of land far exceeds what it will ever make from prime agricultural use? That is where we are at. Dr. Curtin or Mr. Sheehan might be able to speak on the land value side of things.

How does the group propose to eventually have its ideals implemented? Maybe "ideals" is the wrong word; I am not being negative about them. Everything Mr. Mitchell is saying is right. How is the group proposing that they would actually come into being?

I do not think we are that far down the road. From the questions being asked, it is very obvious that everybody has a good grasp of what is happening but nobody has a grasp of the answers and what we are trying to achieve. To simplify it, people are throwing balls up in the air and they are falling everywhere, whether it be energy, food production, entertainment or housing. It is a tiered situation where housing is at the top, then energy, forestry, income, food and all the various tiers that are in food, including dairy and tillage. What is down at the very bottom? Nature is down at the bottom and then farmers who are not as profitable as the higher echelons. Dairy farms are more profitable than tillage farms. I am a dairy farmer and I am totally dependent on tillage farmers. I cannot farm without them. I need bedding for the welfare of the animals. I need feed so I cannot do it without tillage farmers. Yet, most dairy farmers are able to outbid tillage farmers when it comes to purchases and leases. Beef farmers are further down the list and I cannot do without them either. If I cannot sell my calves, there is a huge welfare problem. I am totally dependent on beef farmers. There are no answers yet but there are problems and it is not just my situation. There are very similar situations all over the country and Deputy Kenny alluded to that. It is just that we are looking for direction and a bit of certainty that if you invest in your own farm that at least the investment is there for five or ten years because that is what you invest in when you buy a machine, put in equipment, buy land or put in concrete. They are long-term investments. From a farming point of view, the industry is totally different. CEOs of industry are here today and gone tomorrow. They are not looking at it in terms of the next generation. We have to look at it for the next generation and the generation after, if that makes sense.

On the Senator's question on what we are proposing as solution, it is quite odd to us that Ireland has been very quiet on this, and normally we support European initiatives. The European Commission is calling for member states to show an interest in this pilot for a European land observatory. It is going to be completely voluntary for member states to opt in or opt out. It is just a pilot to see how a land observatory would work and try out-----

That is the gathering of the information.

Yes, the gathering of the information.

It is not going to influence anything going forward.

No, there will be no stepping in for land sales or something that would affect somebody selling land.

We are calling for that and have had engagement with the bioregional weaving lab initiative in SETU around a parish-style or a regional-sized observatory. In this country, we can spend big amounts of money on lots of things. The cost of a pilot observatory at a parish level to show how one could work would be very small money but could have very big results. If it is successful at the parish level, it can be successful at a regional level and a national level. That is pretty much our call in very simple terms.

Has that submission been made to anyone?

We have written to the Department on it and we have spoken to a number of academic institutions but at the end of the day, it boils down to funding, which is part of the reason we are here today.

I thank the witnesses for attending and for their presentations. The land observatory provides a really good opportunity. The statement noted the benefits for planning and land efficiency. It could also play a big role when it comes to generational renewal. We are continually talking about this, the family farm and the number of actual farms going down. Could this have a real impact on those issues and be a positive way to help young farmers in particular? SAFER in France was mentioned and it is a system that that works there. It was referenced in the presentation but the right of first refusal within that system, obviously that could not happen here with the constitutional right to property. I do not see any way it could happen without massive legal and constitutional change. While SAFER has been in place for many years and is effective and one of the best models of it in Europe, land concentration still continues to rise in France. How effective could a land observatory be? How could a land observatory here help in planning generational renewal and efficient land use?

To address land concentration?

Yes.

I want to bring in Dr. McCabe because he has a lot of interesting data on land concentration. We have a complete absence of data when it comes to land concentration. It is very hard to make assumptions about how to address this problem when we do not have proper data on how much land an individual type of farmer has.

The data is scattered. We are working off datasets from a number of different sources. I will let Dr. McCabe come in on that point.

Part of what the land observatory is calling for is clarity on what is going on at national, regional and local levels. At this stage, it is more about informing rather than shaping policy. There is a difference in that regard. Policy comes from the Houses of the Oireachtas, but it should be informed by the clearest possible picture as to what is happening on the ground. We can see from sales, leases and usage of land that there are gaps with the data currently being used. For example, the CSO has a dataset on agricultural land sales that gets put forward as being representative of land sales in Ireland, but there is nuance to it. It is a measure of agricultural land sold for continued agricultural use. It is a particular subset. When it comes to agricultural land that is being taken out of use, it is hard to see that data. When we talk about these ongoing issues, we do so without the clearest picture possible to inform policy. When we fix that, we will then be able to move on from there.

Currently, there are two main datasets for land sales, namely, the CSO dataset and that of the Irish Farmers' Journal. It makes that dataset off its own back. While it has limitations, it is useful. It seems to mainly focus on farm sales. In its 2024 report, it listed 647 farm sales, which were approximately 21% of the land sales measured by the CSO. However, it measures something different.

We have this issue where people are talking about changing land ownership in Ireland but it is being done, in some kind of small way, at an anecdotal level. Policy should never be formulated on anecdotes. That is not a good way to formulate any policy. What form that policy may take is for steps 2, 3 and 4. Step 1 must be to secure the clearest possible picture on the trends. Statistics can provide us with trends as to what is going on.

When it comes to farm size composition, based on the data available, we can see trends towards larger and smaller farms, while medium-sized farms are being squeezed out. We have seen, over a ten-year period, a growth in the composition of farms both over 100 ha and under 10 ha, while there has been a squeeze in farms between 11 ha and 99 ha. We do not know the reason for this. That is where we get into carrying out different research. Whatever the policy, it should never be based on anecdotes. It needs to be based on the clearest possible picture.

I take Dr. McCabe’s point and I understand the premise behind it. I apologise for cutting him off but I have another question and I am conscious of time. The European Commission pilot was mentioned, which was given the green light in April 2025 with €1 million in funding over a two-year period. We are now coming up on April 2026. What actively has been done? I have been looking into this and found it difficult to find information. I note that the Commission sanctioned an expert group on farmland at the end of last week or the start of this week. One of its main roles will be to oversee and orchestrate the land observatory. As I said, what actively is happening? The Commission approved this almost 12 months ago. In the meantime, the CAP and multi-annual financial framework, MFF, have been announced. As part of the CAP, Commissioner Hansen spoke about the land observatory in the context of a suite of measures aimed at regeneration renewal and making things easier for young farmers. Will the witnesses provide an update and some clarity in this regard, as well as their opinion on the expert group on farmland? As I understand it, every member state will have a representative on it.

The expert group will consist of 45 members. Beyond the observatory, it will look into future land trends and how we can address them. As to where the pilot programme is currently at, we were told in July 2025 that a member state would be selected to host the pilot. That has not happened as of yet. To be straight and honest, other global events may have stepped in and this may have fallen down the list. I email regularly over and back in this regard, and the situation is pretty much as it was. We are still waiting. There is supposed to be an announcement on the selected member state for the pilot but, as of yet, we do not have that information.

Will this expert group be able to push that forward? It appears to be progress.

It is like the cart before the horse. Will the pilot country be selected before the expert group is formed? That is anyone's guess.

Fair enough. I thank the witnesses.

I apologise for leaving the committee meeting but I had to speak in the Chamber about rural post offices. What is the main barrier to land availability in Ireland? My questions are quick-fire ones. That is all I will say.

The main issue with farmland in Ireland is that it is based on succession. It is passed down from one generation to the next. The next issue is with what goes up for sale. For example, farmland that was for sale beside me was by public auction. It was advertised and there were six weeks before the auction. I was told that six weeks were not enough for me to contact banks to try to arrange a loan. It is structured for those who already have the funds, such as an investor or company. I was told to form a company rather than try to buy under my name. The way it is currently structured is one of the major issues.

What is the single biggest obstacle to expanding productive farmland in Ireland?

I imagine it is land access. I am in an intensive farming area and the only block of land that came up in my lifetime - I am nearly 60 years of age - was one or two years ago. That was the only land suitable for me. With dairy farming, as the Deputy is aware, you can only milk what platform you have beside the farmyard.

In general, its value is as a financial rather than agricultural asset.

How significant is land holding or investment-driven land purchases in restricting new entrants to farming?

While I am only familiar with dairy farming, the cost of getting into farming, such as the cost of the infrastructure, milking parlours, slurry storage, housing and accommodation for animals, not to mention the land base on top of that, makes it impossible unless a person has a lot of winning.

That is all right. I am just trying to get the answers so that I can get them into my head. How does the current taxation and accounting treatment of agricultural land influence land mobility and generational transfer?

It is done to try to ensure that land is transferred to those under 35 years of age. The stamp duty is effective in that manner. The leasing, however, is done in such a way that there is a requirement of at least seven years. That makes sense with certain objectives but it creates barriers because the land is out of the market for seven years in that instance. The main issue is that companies look at and treat land as an investment and a secure financial asset. They use it as a security holding and, therefore, take it out of the family farm model.

Would a national land database or land use audit improve transparency and market access for young farmers and new entrants?

It would because at least the data would be there. For example, the CSO farm structure survey was voluntary. The data is there but it is all fragmented. Looking at landdirect.ie, people have to go into each portfolio to get the information and, when some information is not there, they have to go to the Registry of Deeds. At the moment, it is not all in one place. To look at the maps, people have to go to Tailte Éireann. There are so many places. The information is not there for us to be able to make a practical decision.

How can hedgerows and biodiversity protection be balanced with the need to increase usable agricultural land supply?

I represent Hedgerows Ireland, which is a group that is dedicated to hedgerows.

That is why I am asking the question.

The issue of hedgerow going along with productive farming is increasingly recognised. There is not a conflict. Healthy hedgerow and field margins are entirely consistent with productive modern farming and that observation is one that is increasingly backed up by research.

Where I want to come in on this is to demonstrate that what is happening worldwide, and particularly at a European level, is that there is a clear association between major land consolidation and landscape simplification or, simply put, the erasure of landscape features, including hedgerows.

I myself have hedgerows. That is why I asked the question.

Would the Irish Land Observatory Stakeholder Group support stronger incentives for land leasing rather than land to improve mobility in the agricultural sector?

We have the data here. Land leases do not necessarily improve mobility. The data has shown that bigger operators are the ones that are leasing the land and it is consolidation by the back door. Examples of this are biogas or solar. Solar takes land for 30 years. Operators can pay far more than any conventional farmer can make from conventional farming.

That is the answer I wanted to the question. Would Mr. Mitchell say that there should be some by-laws passed or whoever has the power to do something should be coming out and saying that windmills, solar farms and so on should be put on land that cannot be used for the production of food? Would Mr. Mitchell agree with me on that, because it is the only way forward?

How do you define what land that is?

Exactly.

Are you going to regale us with what happened with the hen harrier and just tell a farmer that they cannot build on a site on their land or do anything else with it?

We have hundreds of thousands of acres of bogland where peat production has now been cut off. They are talking about re-wetting it, etc. As an active farmer, my opinion is that is where we should be putting the solar farms and there should be by-laws stating that other land is for producing food and we cannot have solar farms on it. I am merely making the point. I was trying to get an answer.

Is Ireland's land market functioning primarily as a productive agricultural market or is it increasingly a speculative asset market? I am asking that because I use public transport and as we went through Kildare this morning, I saw them branching out into another agricultural field. There were four or five diggers out on it. They were only after starting. They were taking up the most beautiful soil. That is the question I want to ask the witnesses. What is their opinion on that?

May I answer that?

Yes.

I can tell that the interest is in productive land and producing food, and that is really important, but we in Leitrim are experiencing something. For instance, my son cannot buy land. Most of the farmers in Leitrim are renting land up the country if they want to be commercial farmers because the forestry can always pay €1,000 an acre more than we can. There is no point in advertising land in Leitrim. Until recently when we started to resist forestry in Leitrim, we could not buy land. What the Deputy has to understand is we are talking about land use change, emissions, climate, etc.

Mr. Mitchell talks about Leitrim. If people way down the country wanted to cut down a forest near them and they got permission, they could do it provided they replaced that amount of forestry in another place, but most of them are going to Leitrim to do that. I am only making that point to Mr. Mitchell. That is why there is a lot of forestry in Leitrim.

There are lessons to be learned from what happened in Leitrim. The Government is talking about planting between 8,000 ha and 30,000 ha per year. It is not asking farmers to do that. Rather, it is setting up a system for large investment companies to do that. There is that pressure on land. They are the people who are going to be setting the prices on future land.

May I just ask one question in case the Chairman is not letting us in for a second round? What is the single most practical policy change the Government could implement-----

There will be a second round.

That is great. What is the most practical policy change the Government - that is why the Irish Land Observatory Stakeholder Group is up here today and we are all part of the Government - could implement within the next 12 months to improve land availability for young people, new entrants and people who do not have land? Some of the best farmers I know and whom I saw coming out of agricultural colleges to work on farms as young people had no land. There is only one way they can do it, namely, get land and go up. That is all.

Look what is happening in Scotland. I do not have the answers for the Deputy. In Scotland, where there are large landowners, there are billionaires that own mountains. It is a big area. The people were removed from Scotland. What is happening there is that local communities are now getting the first opportunity on land that comes up for sale. I do not accept that, under the Constitution, we cannot prioritise bringing new entrants onto land and giving them access to land. It has to be the Government's objective and policy to find a solution and legislate for it, as is being done in France and Scotland. We cannot do that without information. If people do not know that these problems exist or the extent to which they exist, there will not be support for solutions.

I will have a nice question for Dr. Curtin in the second round.

Very good. I call Deputy Cooney.

I thank all of the witnesses for coming in and providing for their opening statements.

Mr. Long, in his opening statement, raised something that comes up often. Mr. Long stated, "Almost every member state is grappling with the same challenges: ageing farm populations; growing pressure on land; and an unsettling lack of clear information about what is really happening beneath the surface." That is serious. I must say there are a lot of good young farmers but we should encourage young farmers to keep coming through. We are constantly talking about the ageing farming population, which we can see happening, but it is vital to encourage the young ones to come through and continue on the family farm. Unfortunately, there are too many part-time farmers now with jobs and it is probably doing out other farmers as well. Mr. Long might elaborate on his statement in that regard.

On the young farmers?

No, on the ageing farming population and the line after that in the statement.

Even taking it from a European perspective as well as an Irish perspective, less than 5% of farmers in Ireland under the age of 40 own land. The average age of farmers is somewhere up near 60 years. I wholeheartedly agree with the Deputy that we need to see more young farmers coming on. I myself come from a farm. It is something that you want to do. Looking at my own area, I want to see young farmers come on but I look around and it is older farmers that are there. We have to look at the reasons for that. If you are a young farmer starting out and, as Dr. Curtin outlined, you go into the bank, land prices in my area are between €25,000 and €30,000 an acre. It is hard to find a conventional enterprise that would give you that return on that amount. You are going up against established buyers that tend to have money coming in from outside of agriculture and land is a good vehicle to invest in. You are also coming up against established farmers, as in dairy farmers, that have set up and are at scale. There are obviously beef farmers at scale as well. You have to accept that there is a challenge there for the young farmer. The Land Mobility Service in Ireland has done some fantastic work in trying to address that.

Deputy Aird asked what the Government could do in the next 12 months. We as a group collectively talked about this. We did not come up just to complain about the problem, but to try to put some solutions forward. Even if it was a small measure of running a pilot scheme and applying some of the stuff that we have talked about here to try to address some of those issues even on a regional level, it would leave scope to broaden that out to a national level. You would be doing something that is in line with Europe.

Make no mistake about it, this is not only an Irish problem. It is a European problem as well. Our European partners are very much aware of it, too. It is not individualised to Ireland but there is no readily available answer.

In my opinion, the issue in generational renewal is that people are looking at what has gone before them. They are looking at their own parents and the stress and the scale that they are now at to make a living and they are turning away from it. It is as simple as that. There are incentives for young farmers coming in. It is not a financial issue. It is the stress and the scale that they need to be at. There is the stress of trying to bring in operators that they cannot get locally. A lot of the labourers on dairy farms now are from abroad.

I know of several instances where young people have turned their backs on the family farm because there are other, easier ways. Until that is addressed, throwing money at it is not the answer.

To add to that, a lot of the red tape, the paperwork-----

Absolutely.

-----and the criteria they have to go through-----

It all goes with it.

-----is not helping the situation. Also, if they do not meet the proper criteria, we know where they can be penalised on different schemes that they are involved in. Is that an issue?

There are now more penalties. The real issue is the pure torture and drudgery that is involved with large-scale farming. I refer to the number of animals you need to be viable and the amount of stress that goes with that at this time of the year and the fulfilment. Young people are looking at more than economics. They have young families, or they propose to have them, and are looking at it to see whether it is a family occupation or not. Inevitably, it may not be if they look at what has happened over the past 20 to 30 years. In my opinion, there is a lack of fulfilment in farming. I love farming and will not change at this stage.

There are a lot of good young farmers who are very interested in farming.

Absolutely, I would agree. There are ways into farming. They can lease farms. Again, it goes back to the infrastructure, the equipment and the cost of it. There are ways out of that but very often the support is not there and they are often left on their own.

Which is a pity. Will elaborate on another thing mentioned in the opening statement to see how we can drive forward on it? Mr. Long said, "The family farm is the bedrock of our food system." Mr. Long is right. How can we drive that forward and encourage young people, because of that line, to get involved in farming?

There is a very simple answer to that question. Look at Bord Bia and what has gone on over the past couple of weeks and all the debate around that. What does that boil down to? It boils down to people wanting to know where their food comes from. The consumer who buys food trusts that it comes from a family farm that uses low-intensity methods and does not come from a factory farm. It is what separates the European food system from other more industrialised systems. The issue is how can we address that in the next 12 months. I believe that if I asked everyone in this room to define a family farm, they would all have a different definition for it. It is a term that is thrown about but it is a banner that even the most industrialised farms in Europe can go under. I can have 5,000 cows or one cow but my milk will still end up in the same carton of milk and will be under a family farm banner. If there was one thing we could get out of today, it would be a proper definition of a family farm and to put numbers on it because that is where we are at. Everybody cannot come under the banner of a family farm. When we have a definition, we should target supports towards that definition.

Earlier, I mentioned young farmers. Mr. Long said he would comment on them. What are his views on trying to support young farmers to get involved in farming?

As I said, when you bring in young farmers, it is about creating access to farming. There are farmers who do not have land but who could be very good farmers. There are also young farmers who want to get going. The Land Mobility Service does fantastic work around marrying more established farmers with farmers and creating lease agreements. It is about making it more attractive and readily available for young farmers to make use of it. People say land leases are a great way for farmers to get in but if you look at the profile of the farmer who is doing it, it is generally a bigger operator, the fella setting up a second or third unit. It is rare to see a young farmer setting up at scale and growing. At the end of the day, if you have land and are thinking of retiring, with the best will in the world, you might want to give it to a young farmer but it boils down to brass tacks and whoever pays the most money for the land will most likely-----

Another issue when trying to get more young farmers to take on the land is that the income or profit is not there. When I did the green cert a couple of years ago, I remember one of the teachers in the agricultural college asked us how many of us were part-time farmers or beef farmers. We were told the income from our jobs would be used to subsidise the farm and to accept that and get on with it. I will inherit a family farm but my father knew I would have to have an off-farm job and that it was not going to happen otherwise. People are being told this straightaway. When I am at work, some of what is in my pocket will be spent subsidising the farm unlike the person sitting beside me. On the family farm model, the foundations of it are that people are doing it out of a sense of duty because the farm has been in the family for seven generations and they do not want to be the ones to stop that. That is what it is currently sitting on. When people no longer have that sense of duty, a lot will collapse.

Last week it was reported in the Kilkenny People that mentioned 189 ha in south Kilkenny would be used for solar panels. The majority of that land is good land. Not far away from it there is the Ballyfasy wind farm. That is just in south Kilkenny. It is a huge amount of land that is good agricultural land.

The SAFER model has existed in France since the 1960s. In France, there has been a huge decline. Since the 1980s, nearly 66,000 ha of agricultural land per year have been lost. Between 2014 and 2023, 1.4 million ha have been lost. Therefore, there has been a reduction from 19.3 million ha to 18 million ha. How is SAFER working in France if things seem to be going backwards since the 1960s, like what has happened here? French farming has taken huge hits. How can the witnesses give me confidence that the SAFER model would work here?

I do not have the data on where the 1 million hectares of land went and is now used for. Nobody said that SAFER is perfect. SAFER has flaws, the same as any system has flaws. The Scottish Government has looked at it as a model. We do not have readily available examples from around Europe to look at in terms of maintaining family farms and farmers on land. It is the closest model we have. The people in SAFER will say it is not perfect. At the moment in Ireland, we have nothing. At least it is an example to work towards. There are many elements of SAFER that would not work in Ireland but there are elements that are worth looking at. It was put in place after the war to keep as many of the family farms viable and as many farming families on the land as possible.

It would be worth looking at it and doing the percentages. Between 2014 and 2023, France lost 7.25% of its agricultural land to building or whatever. I imagine if the calculations were done for a lot of other countries, you would probably get similar percentages without SAFER. That is what I am trying to figure out. From what I have read, the government or SAFER can step in and purchase land. Am I correct? Senator Paul Daly gave the example of land.

It is almost like a regulatory body that steps in. It monitors the amount of land that is purchased. If there is excessive consolidation, it has the power to step in. It does not always step in. It also has land designated in the same way we zone land for housing. Land could be zoned for, maybe, dairy, tillage and beef and if a person buys the land, then it can only be used for dairy, tillage and beef. From an environmental point of view, there are elements that could be looked at. We are talking about land for solar. We have land that was used for peat extraction that, potentially, could be used for solar. Rewetting is coming down the tracks and we are trying to designate land for that. There is potential that if we were to re-imagine a SAFER system in Ireland, it could address those types of issues.

I keep going back to the point that SAFER is not perfect and I do not think anyone claims it is but it is the only working example in Europe that has decades-long experience-----

Is SAFER funded by the government?

Yes.

What I took from what I read was that in certain situations it could step in. Senator Paul Daly gave the example of somebody wanting to buy land for solar farms or whatever, and that it could step in-----

Yes, that is true.

-----and purchase the land.

No. It could stop the sale. The buyer might not be suitable so it may look for a more suitable buyer.

In regard to forestry, if a farmer who has gone into forestry passes down a farm to somebody, that son, daughter or whoever is tied into it for the rest of his or her life even though he or she has not signed up to it. It is very hard to push somebody into something they have not signed up to and to say the land must be used for forestry or farming forever. It is a difficult subject, that is, telling somebody their land has to stay as agricultural land.

I do not know how you would do it.

There was an interesting figure of a 300% increase in land lease contracts since 2014. At least it is staying in agriculture, I suppose, but the prices are outrageous and there is a huge battle between the tillage farmer and the suckler farmer. In many situations I have seen, the dairy farmer wins out. It is staying in agriculture - that is the plus side of it - but as Mr. Sheehan said, you need everybody. You need the tillage farmer and the suckler farmer. Somebody has to take the calves.

How will we make a better database? We all keep our books every year and say how much land we have, even down to what it is used for. Is there a way to bring together the various groups like the auctioneers and trying to collect that data for the database? You would imagine it would not be very hard if you had people on board.

We are missing a huge part of the data. That is why I say what is happening in Leitrim is important. On the farm the Deputy talked about and the person who planted their land and was leaving it to the next generation, there is a cycle there where that family ends up without any income after 15 or 20 years. That land is worth something but they cannot extract anything from it for a period. What people are missing is the issue of institutional ownership and the scale that could be happening at in Ireland. There does not seem to be any awareness of that. We see companies that are buying scattered plots of land of 10 ha here and there, building up massive portfolios of 4,000 ha and 5,000 ha and then selling those to institutional owners.

If we try to change policy or bring in a system where we regulate or make space for farmers because we are looking at land use and how we will manage it, we are just about to sign up to investor protection, so how will these foreign investors take the news that we want to decide whether they could or could not buy that land? We are at a handover moment with institutional buyers of land.

A question was asked about France. In that regard and when it comes to big investors, we can use Bill Gates as a person's name because we understand the concept of these massive oligarchs buying land. That is the reason, but nobody is monitoring the effect of these institutional buyers that are in the Irish land market now. They will be protected after the arbitration Bill is signed. They will be protected by trade deals and will sue the State if we change policy in future on whether they can have access to land.

Everybody wants the man who is selling the land to get the best price but you cannot have your cake and eat it. If you are going to protect the small farmer and the young person who wants to continue farming, you have to legislate for that. That has to happen, but it cannot be done if it is decided that the investors can sue the State in a foreign court and stop us from doing that.

I welcome the witnesses. I was listening earlier and you do not have to be Einstein to know what has gone wrong. We were probably all brought up on small farms. I remember back in 1978, my sister, God rest her, bought a Ford Escort car. It cost £2,780. We sold a Friesian bullock - I will always remember him because I was only a gossoon - in Roscommon mart. They gave them clenbuterol and everything in that time. He went for £970, so three of them would have been enough to buy that car. How many of them would you want today? Can you not see what is happening? EU policy and successive Governments' policies have devalued the price of the livestock.

We were all brought up on small farms. We might not have had a lot but we had everything we wanted. Now, you need more land to survive. You need more cattle or sheep to survive. We are having all of these inquests into things, but we just need to look at the fact of what has happened. There were 5.5 million farmers lost in Europe in 15 years. That is a fact. Why? They got out. Why do you need more land now? You need it to try to make a living. We have lost 240,000 suckler cattle because the calf was not paying until now. That is it. It is all about maths and survival.

I saw a reference to the question of who owned the land. A farmer is the registered owner. As Senator Daly said, there are CPOs for the likes of roads and different things, but we must get the definition. EU law has trampled our rights, to be quite frank about it. Unfortunately, I know more about special areas of conservation, SACs, than probably most people. Someone can designate your land and leave it valueless. However, we have accepted that because we have voted for every treaty. Let us not be whistling about it after that. That is the bottom line on that.

We had a great system at one time. It might not have been the greatest or straightest in places but the Land Commission brought people from small farms in the west - Leitrim, Galway and all of our areas, probably including Kerry - up to Meath and other places. It bought land.

The one thing we have to do, and it is a hard conversation to have, is ask what a family farm is? The answer to that will decide it all. What is a family farm? It is 100 acres? The average single farm payment is for 34 ha at the moment. Is a family farm 80 acres? Is it 500 acres or what is it? That is what we have to decide or we will be going nowhere with that.

Mapping, soil types and water were referred to. I do not know what all of that has to do with trying to get farms to young farmers.

The other thing we could do to help would be to allow a father giving land to a son or daughter a tax break because unless there is a scheme brought in for retirement, you will not hand land on. If I give it to Senator Daly, I can get a tax free allowance, but if I give it to my son, I cannot get anything. These are the things we have to look at to be proactive.

I do not know what happened in France. I would like to, though, so the witnesses might just give a quick briefing because I have a few other bits I want to go through.

Will we have the likes of the Land Commission and decide that if somewhere is in a farming area, it will be a certain price? In his document, Mr. Sheehan spoke about land beside him and he was buying it or whatever. He cannot dictate things. If he was selling his land, he would like to get the best price he could. We have to have conversations about whether some guy who has 10,000 or 11,000 acres can come in and blow out everyone? We have to set hard rules or we will return to landlord Ireland and it will be Irish people who will be the new landlords. That is where we are heading - let us be very clear on that. Whether we like that or not, we are heading that way. It is aided and abetted by both the EU and successive Governments.

Dr. Moore spoke about hedgerows in the Monaghan report. This seems to be trotted out every time. Under successive schemes and off the top of my head, we have something like 11,000 km of hedgerows sown. Is that right or wrong?

Does the Deputy mean 11,000 km of hedgerows removed?

No, new hedgerows sown under all of the schemes.

I have seen a figure of 2,000 km in recent years-----

We have it on Google. Is that not right, Deputy Lawless?

It is really important to differentiate between newly planted hedgerows and removed-----

Have we that length of hedgerow sown, yes or no?

The Deputy raises a great point because data is very thin on the ground. I tried to get recent-----

We have data here that says 11,000 km of hedgerows were planted through all of the different farm schemes since the beginning of, say, 2000. The first thing I looked at in the presentation was that we had lost 1,400 km. I challenged the Monaghan report before about how it was done with a circumference of 3 km. I was interested in reading about the Cathaoirleach's example of flowers being sown.

Do people recognise that since the most recent CAP, 96.8% of farmers in this country have put 10% aside for space for nature? That might be right or wrong.

That is wrong.

Some 96% have done it.

It is not 10%.

That is the minimum.

No.

Yes.

There would not be 10%.

You have to put in a minimum of 10% to get the eco scheme payment, just so Mr. Sheehan knows.

That is a weighted figure and it would not be accurate.

You have to put in 10% to get your eco scheme payment if you are a farmer.

Yes, but it would not be an accurate estimation. Ten per cent is-----

It is the Department that has done it. It is not us.

Yes.

Second of all------

Hedgerows are valued at 10 m wide.

I am talking about space for nature. You do not need to have all hedgerows for space for nature.

In estimating the space for nature, hedgerows are weighted at 10 m wide.

Yes, but I am not talking specifically about hedgerows. If I have a drain and an area left to provide space for nature, as Mr. Sheehan has done with his flowers, it is space for nature.

Yes, but hedgerows are included.

I know that. I am saying that every farmer, whether it is a drain or a ditch, as they call it in some parts of the country, whether it is what Mr. Sheehan has done or a hedgerow, you have to have 10% put aside to qualify for the eco scheme. Is the not the case?

You have to have 10% but the 10% is not accurate. It could be 7% or 8%. Hedgerows are weighted as 10 m wide and there is no hedgerow down my way that is 10 m wide.

Most farmers in the west of Ireland have hit 22%.

Yes, possibly.

Those farmers are not shaving it tight.

No, possibly.

We had better give them a bit of credit for that.

That is absolutely so.

The Monaghan report was done on a 3 km radius. Ten kilometres were brought down to 3 km. The figure for that section was probably right but you cannot multiply that by a country.

I agree that you cannot. However, the latest EPA figures should state that 1,400 km are removed per year. The national forestry inventory talks about 1,000 ha of hedgerow removed per annum between 2017 and 2022. Those are enormous figures, but the lack of good data is what unites all of us in this room.

Yes.

We need to know a lot more about what is actually going on. One of the roles of the land observatory will be just that.

I was reading about Mr. Sheehan's situation. He said that the land beside him became dear and he could not get a farm. Am I right that he signed up to an organic scheme and an agri-climate rural environment scheme, ACRES, scheme, as he said in his presentation,-----

Yes.

-----without having the land for five years?

Yes.

You are not supposed to do that. Is that right?

No, I had it and the lease has gone now this year.

It is five years you are supposed to have land if you are going into an ACRES or organic scheme. Is that right or wrong? You are supposed to have a lease for five years or own the land, one or the other. If you do that, you pay back.

There was an agreement there that I would buy the land.

Mr. Sheehan then could not buy it because it became so dear.

Yes.

The following goes for all European countries. We have to make hard decisions. Are we going to get landlords to keep buying us back and have fewer people in an area or are we going to bring in the likes of the land commission, set a realistic price for land and divide it out in the eight and ten acres, as it was done one time, to local people who want it? There is another question that no one is addressing. How do we bring young people into farming? Do they want to farm? Farming is seven days a week. It is not leaving the site on Friday at 12 noon and going on the beer for the weekend. That is the difference.

I welcome the witnesses. I, too, remember the Irish Land Commission. While many people dreaded the land commission, it played a vital role in certain instances where people were not able to survive on the bit of land they had and were moved up to better land in the midlands. A farm right beside me was not being used and the owner was given a chance to sell it or else it was going to be divided between 16 neighbours around him. I remember that well. He was not tilling one acre of the land. It was quite a big farm. There was 40 acres of woodland and perhaps as much again of middling land but it was all fairly sound ground. We need something like that now. We have entrances for the hen harrier and places designated for it. Those areas are made useless. They cannot be planted for forestry and cannot be used in the manner the farmer wants to use them. There are now talks of more designation. Some 13% of the land of Ireland is now under different designations and there is talk of bringing that up to 30%. We are a very small country. It is terrible to think about what it is happening under our noses and that Europe is ordering or designing these schemes. For the hen harriers, there was designation for a bit and there were payments but there are no payments now. I often call that daylight robbery. Thieves normally come in the middle of the night and rob machinery or money. Doing that to farmers in the daylight makes it daylight robbery. They can do that and get away with it.

I have been listening to the proposal for a land observatory and have been told that we will have data. Is that a line for the Department of agriculture? Who are we expecting to fund this?

It would have to be trusted and independent. At the moment, most of the land data is coming from the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland or the Central Statistics Office, CSO, as Dr. McCabe mentioned. The data with the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland is fed in by auctioneers. Whether it is an uncomfortable truth or not, auctioneers have a vested interest in keeping business coming through the door. Farmers, members of the public and politicians, such as the Deputy, are looking for trusted data. They want independent and trusted data.

Will the organisation have teeth to say what should be done? Would it have the teeth to stop a place being sold?

Deputy Fitzmaurice made the point about having a land commission with teeth. We will discuss that with partners. The Commission does not want to give it teeth and is leaving it optional for member states. The reason it does not want to give it teeth is that we are constantly trying to balance a debate. The person selling the land has a right to maximise its value equal to the right of the person buying to get value for it. From a personal perspective, I think it should have teeth because I think the horse has now bolted and we need to rein it back in a little. Whether Ireland is ready for something like that with teeth is a whole other question. That is a debate for another day. We are very much working in an information vacuum.

I am conscious of the time. We have a situation in Kerry whereby the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS, is buying up land. In Killarney, it has 27,000 acres of land, going back to the 1930s or some time. That land was donated to the State. There are 27,000 acres there. It is growing rhododendron and harbouring deer. There is no fence around it. The NPWS has money to maintain it. At the same time, it is coming down to Kilgarvan and buying 57 acres and, as the term goes, giving London for it. The local people could not get a look in. The NPWS bought more land going back towards Dingle at the top of the Conor Pass. We do not know how many millions that cost.

We talk every day about how we can better young farmers and try to get young farmers involved. When they cannot source and buy a bit of land, they have no hope. They need to expand.

They are the kinds of things happening in our county. The NPWS will not even fence the land. It is leaving the deer out on the road and people are being killed and it wants to have more land and do the same thing with it. If farmers have an animal that goes out on the road, as happened last week, and breaks a car or hurts someone, they or their insurance are responsible. The question is whether the witnesses can do anything. If they can get this land observatory going, how will it help us in such matters?

If we felt they could intervene and play a role, we would all be mad for it. We have nothing against them. As they said, we do not know what is happening. We see people with 1,100 cows selling the cows and putting in solar panels. We are only a small country and I was brought up to cultivate and try to do the best with every corner or square inch we had because we did not have much and to make the best we could from it. That is how we were brought up and I am sad to see that is gone AWOL now. I do not know if the committee can make a case for the witnesses to get teeth and have powers. I am sure every member would be for it, but we do not know what benefit they will be bring. We have nothing against them. I do not know any of them so I could not have anything against them. We like to hear them talk and we are glad they came but we need to ensure as much of our land as possible is kept producing something, whether it is milk, dairy or grain. Deputies Aird, Fitzmaurice and the others agree. That is the frame of mind we are in. People talk about solar panels. They are not the bee's knees either. Everyone learned that fairly quickly because there are problems with them too. It is not money directly into their pocket and the sooner they realise that the better.

We are glad the witnesses came. It is something for us to think about. We appreciate the Cathaoirleach was right to ensure they came so I thank them for coming.

I have-----

The Deputy, like the other Deputies here, have acknowledged we have a crisis and are on the edge of a serious situation, particularly in relation to new and entrant farmers. The feeling in the room, if I am picking it up correctly, is that something must be done. The pilot land observatory may be toothless but at least it is a start. As a data gathering exercise, it is vital. I would interject, on behalf of the environmental issue, that the corporate overseas land investor is certainly not the custodian of the land we so desperately need. That much is clear. Therefore, from an environmental point of view, among all the other points of view, we have to do something and we hope the committee will support us in the idea of a pilot land observatory.

Unfortunately I missed the opening statement. I was just reading through it.

With the new schemes, if farmers remove a hedgerow at the moment, they must plant back double what they remove.

Yes, under conditionality, there is a requirement to plant double the amount.

Why is that?

It is a recognition of the value of hedgerows, but unfortunately, it does not take account of the fact that, according to Catherine Keena of Teagasc, who is an expert in this area, a new hedge could take 50 years to supply the same value and that most new hedges tend to be a monoculture and are often imported from overseas, which brings a risk of fire blight. The conditionality rule is there to recognise the importance of hedgerows, but under new conditionality rules, which is worth advertising, there are only three exceptional circumstances under which hedges can be removed. They are building access, road safety and farm safety. Bizarrely, the current environmental impact assessment regulations still allow the removal of 0.5 km of hedgerow. The rules at the moment are crazy. They do not make sense. That is the situation, as the Senator correctly outlined.

Unfortunately, we have not had a management hedgerow system in Ireland for a number of years so most of the make-up of our hedges is sparse. There is whitethorn, blackthorn and a number of trees. A lot of whins, briars and other stuff makes up our hedgerows.

That is true.

Dr. Moore spoke about biodiversity. When the hedgerow, which has briars and so on, is removed, nine times out of ten, it is out in the field 8 ft to 12 ft either side. It is clipped back. The hedgerow is not stock-proof. When spreading slurry, it is necessary to stay 5 m away from a hedge. In areas like Longford, Leitrim and others, if farmers kept 5 m away from one hedge and 5 m away from another hedge, it would not be worth going into the fields because they are that small and, therefore, they feel they need to remove certain hedges to make fields viable and to get in with machinery. They still have to plant 2 m for every metre of hedge they remove. Not only that, they have to plant a double hedge. It is not a single hedge. A double whitethorn hedge is planted for every single row taken out. Therefore, four times the amount is actually been planted. Dr. Moore said people only have to plant a hedgerow, but the rules and regulations state there have to be a certain number of trees within a metre, which is a double row.

Yes, it is a staggered row.

That is correct. I call it a double row. Therefore, really farmers are planting 2 m, as double rows, to replace every metre. In certain areas of the country, farmers have invested in machinery. They feel that in the smaller parcels of land, they can close a gripe and take away the ditch to make 2 acres into 5 acres to harvest more of a crop. However, the penalties for doing that are a 1% on their single farm payment, conditional, for taking out the hedge, even though they plant two metres for it.

To respond to the Senator's point, there is growing recognition that hedgerows are an asset on the farm; they are not a nuisance. They perform many valuable roles. Flooding is a huge issue at the moment, as he will be aware, and hedgerows are hugely important for that. However, his is well-made that the quality of hedgerows at the moment is not good and we are pushing, as are the major farming organisations, for better payments for quality hedgerows, which could be a massive incentive to improve our existing stock of hedgerows. We are extremely lucky in this country that we still have a hedgerow system that is largely intact and we are the envy of many countries for that reason. However, I take the Senator's point that some fields need rationalisation for machinery. That point was well made and I think everyone would accept that. However, in general terms, hedgerows are now seen to have so many values, environmental and economic, that the case for their retention and improvement is well understood.

Why not implement a scheme where hedge laying is mandatory? When a hedge is planted, it grows up in the air and underneath is no longer stock-proof. If we want to be part of the eco-scheme, part of the mandatory, have proper hedgerows and cut out wire, posts and fencing, which has been done in the UK and every other country, why is there no proper eco-scheme under which farmers can lay hedges and get compensated for it?

Under ACRES there was payment for rejuvenation of hedgerows, and that was very much welcomed. As I said, better payments for quality hedges would be a very simple method of incentivising something that is really important.

If I can comment on that, laying hedges is generally for one or two species only - blackthorn and whitethorn. At a time when there is a biodiversity crisis, it is generally recommended in any new hedge to have five or six species at a minimum; and a lot of those species will not take laying. Laying is a stock-proof measure but it is not a biodiversity measure. It would not be a good climate change measure either. You are very limited when you are laying a hedge in that once the plant goes beyond ten years old, you cannot re-lay it because it is too strong. Once the plant gets to a certain level, what you are doing is cutting down the quality of it. You will not get the same foliage. You will get very little blossom out of it. It is just a stock-proof measure and in general the recommendation now would be to fence the hedge and let the hedgerow grow rather than laying. Laying is a tradition more than a biodiversity measure.

Laying is a tradition that has worked here for thousands of years.

As a stock-proof measure, yes, but now there are more important things like carbon drawdown, biodiversity improvement and water quality. All those issues are equally important or more important than stock-proofing.

We certainly should not move away from the old ways. There is merit in what our ancestors did regarding laying hedges. When I laid a copper beech hedge - Mr. Sheehan has just said to me it would not be one of the types of hedges you would lay - it turned out to be one of the finest hedges in our area. When it is laid and kept maintained, it has a status to it. We need to look at our counterparts across the water when it comes to hedge-laying. Before the Cathaoirleach finishes up with me-----

There will be another opportunity afterwards. I want to get Deputy Lawless in for his first opportunity.

I thank the witnesses for coming in. Land availability is a very important topic, especially for young farmers who are such a small percentage of farmers. Every time I go to a mart, there are few young people there, which is very unfortunate. I spoke to a farmer recently who was outbid by Coillte, essentially. He had been looking at this field for years, if not decades. His father farmed the land next door. His older brother got the family farm and he was hoping that one day when this land came up, he could acquire it. Unfortunately, he was outbid by Coillte. I support the concept. I am very concerned about institutional investment in Irish farms by corporate investors and pension funds, many of which do not reside in the country. They are around the world and have no real interest in Ireland or our communities other than making money. I have no difficulty with making money but obviously the Government of Ireland should - first and foremost - protect Irish citizens, family farms, rural Ireland and rural communities. It is very sad, really. We do not have a national database on this trend, which is going to grow because of the pressure on land from forestry, renewable energy and so on. We need a strategy. We need to ensure we do not have Irish land going wholesale to corporate foreign investors. I very much welcome this conversation and look forward to hearing more. Will the witnesses expand on their proposal and on what data would be captured? Have they proposals for how we protect the individual landowner who may be selling but also the country, the environment and rural communities?

I thank the Deputy. We do not have to reinvent the wheel here. A number of issues have been raised. The main reason we have come up here is to try to put forward solutions rather than more problems. I do not think we circulated it to members but we have data from the Central Statistics Office, in which it can be seen that the number of farms over 100 ha has increased by 2,700 since 2020. In the middle are the farms between 10 ha and 100 ha and it can be seen that they are all in decline. Those farms are the ones we call "family farms". If you go around Ireland, you will see that the majority of farms fit into that category.

As to how we see a land observatory working and how it can fit in, we see it having a pivotal role in defining what a family farm is. Without defining that, we cannot target supports for that definition and exclude entities that are not family farms. We can see the observatory publishing quarterly data on land movements; who owns the land; the type of farmer who owns the land, such as dairy or beef or renewable energy; and, as has been mentioned, potentially stepping in with teeth where there is excessive consolidation taking place.

We have the land mobility service in place. It is a matchmaking service, essentially, for farmers who want to retire and farmers who do not have land. We see the observatory potentially playing a role in expanding that and being able to match farmers who want to get into farming with those who may want to retire and do not have an obvious successor identified. We think it can have a role in addressing the problems of not having enough young farmers, and having a lot of older farmers with no successor.

Price is a different issue. If you look around the country, there are parts where land value is far higher than in other parts. Addressing that is a much more complex exercise. If we define a "family farm", we can put in place legislation to support those families to buy that land or to access it through leasing. I caution that Ireland's relationship with land - I would not call it an unhealthy relationship - means that people want to exercise their property rights and maximise the value of their land when they are selling it. This boils down to an argument between the social good and the economic good. That is why we are here and that is what we are teasing out here.

Where are the trends in the land consolidation that is happening? Where are they going? Is it to renewables? Do the witnesses have any estimate of the amount of land that is controlled by corporate entities?

There is a bit of research going at the moment called the JUSTLAND study. The team there has already spent about six months doing research to answer the question the Deputy asked. We are seeing the consolidation of land. Let us go back to the farmer who planted his land 30 years ago. That land may have been in forestry and may have stayed in that family, but what happens is that it ends up in a situation where there is no income from that land. It is only anecdotal at the moment but we believe all that land has been gathered up and sold in portfolios. It is ending up in portfolios of 4,000 ha, but they are not blocks of land. The forestry companies are buying those smaller parcels of land - maybe 10 ha each - all over County Leitrim and all over the country. Then they are putting them into big portfolios and selling them to institutional investors that are trading outside the country. They are buying land in France and all over the world. That is very serious and it is not being captured by the CSO. When land is sold in forestry, it does not get captured. It is not considered farmland at that stage. We do not have data on that. In order to find that data, you have to go into each folio and check it and take that information. That information is being hidden from people.

If we are going to sort these problems, we need to own the land. We all accept that if the Irish people own the land, they will work their way through these figures. The question was asked of whether the next generation will work. Of course they will. They will work as hard as the last one and they will work until they fall on the land. That is the reality. There will always be a generation that will come on and carry on farming, but they cannot do it if somebody else owns the land.

It is not that long since we did not own the land. We have had it only a very short time. There is an interest in taking it from people. That is the lesson we have from Leitrim. If members think that they are safe, that this is happening only to us, that they can go to Leitrim and plant a bit of a land if they want to take out a few trees, they are missing the point. This model of land grab is happening in New Zealand, Chile and America and it is happening here now. Members will have to decide to sort the problem. It is not Europe's fault; it is happening in the Dáil. I know I said it already, but Members need to look at the investor protection because they will protect investors. We are all talking about Mercosur. Mercosur was decided in Europe because there was no investor protection. Because there is investor protection in CETA, it has to be voted on in the Dáil. The Arbitration (Amendment) Bill is being put forward to allow foreign investors to sue the Irish State in foreign tribunals. Members must be aware of that but they are not talking about it in relation to land. They should understand that we do not really know. I think this came out here when members spoke to Coillte. I do not know if I am allowed to mention the name of the company where that issue was raised. That is only the tip of the iceberg, and we do not know because the information is not being collected. That is what we are saying, that the land observatory is one way of collecting that information. All these things, including the environment and biodiversity, then have to be balanced. We want to see trees planted everywhere. We are not against anything, no more than members are against solar panels or wind turbines, but we need to be in control of those decisions, and we cannot be in control of them if nobody knows anything about what is happening.

I have just a few quick ones for Mr. Long. How do we decide what a family farm is? I think we all agree that that decision has to be made. Do we tilt the CAP and everything towards that to try to bring them up to compete with others? Is that a solution to what Mr. Long is saying? Does he agree that something like the Land Commission needs to be brought in? We might criticise our property rights here, but by God property rights in Europe can be whipped away from you fairly quickly compared with here. Where does Mr. Long see that balance going? I agree completely with an awful lot of what Mr. Mitchell has said, but it will take hard decisions. In my opinion, unless we have the likes of the Land Commission that will buy farms, we will be back here again. They are getting bigger and bigger. It is happening everywhere. There is no point in saying it is not. The bigger guy is able to get more funding in a bank and able to keep going. It is like what was spoken about earlier. It was not possible to compete with the €22,000 per acre, I think, off the top of my head, so it had to be pulled back, and that will have an effect down the road. What does Mr. Long think?

On the Land Commission, I agree that a Land Commission-style reinvention in Ireland would work. To give an idea of the success of the Land Commission, in 1898, 98% of Irish farmers did not own land. By 1927 it was 98% in the opposite direction. That just proves it can work.

On the family farm, I think we need a hard and fast definition of it. I will put my head on a plate here as to what the definition should be. It should be that the majority of the labour on that farm comes from the people on the farm. Let us say that an average herd of cows is 100, so anywhere from 150 cattle down would come in as a family farm. They are not hard and fast figures but I am just throwing figures at it. You have to start somewhere. Once you start going into 400, 500 or 600 cows, to my mind they are not family farms. When you are leasing multiple units, I do not see those as family farms either, but that is another day's work.

To respond to the Deputy's question as to whether we need to tilt the CAP towards that definition, a hundred per cent. That is the whole point of defining a family farm. I do not mean to criticise Deputies and Senators. For public representatives when they go out and want to support agriculture, the first thing that is always mentioned is the family farm and how they are completely in support of it, but what exactly are they completely in support of? As I mentioned earlier, when a farmer with ten cows sends his milk to the creamery versus a farmer with a thousand cows, it is the same milk in the tank and they all go under that family farm banner. It is the same as if you slaughter a bullock. If you have a thousand bullocks or one bullock, it is still all under that family farm banner. We need to separate that out. That is where we need to start.

On the property rights side of things, other countries, like with SAFER, have managed to negotiate their way around property rights, respecting them while at the same time implementing that social good. This boils down to a choice between the local GAA team and keeping people in rural areas and the economic good of individuals who want to maximise the value of their land. Do you sort out the few who want to sell land or the majority living in those rural areas? That is the question members need to ask themselves.

Someone spoke about pockets of land being bought up by forestry companies. We are after seeing Storm Éowyn and half the forestry in this country is flattened at the moment. To be honest, 70% of them will never be replanted because people who are after taking out the trees will not be fit to replant them since, with half of the pulp that has gone away now, there is a bad price for it and the replanting costs without a grant for replanting will not leave it viable. I know several who will not even bother cutting the plantings off the ground. How in God's name will we solve that? Mr. Mitchell talked about land grabs. Most of these companies coming in here and buying up this are buying up carbon credits, let us be honest about it. We are talking about aeroplane companies and everybody else. Is it viable to say that the only way that this will work is that we create a system here whereby a farmer gets paid for his credits? Marginal land in Leitrim or Roscommon has a carbon sink of X, Y and Z. To protect the smaller communities and the vulnerable communities in the west of Ireland and in Leitrim and Longford, we will have to create a tiered system whereby a farmer gets paid for carbon credits or something that is viable within the land. There is talk of environmental issues and putting up windmills and turbines and all the rest. Carbon credits are the way to go and they are owned by the State, as far as I am aware. Is there a mechanism there whereby a farmer can get paid for his credits?

I know that carbon farming has been pushed for a long time but I will just give my opinion on it. We should not be creating a carbon commodity because then it leads to the polluters of the world selling us, farmers, their carbon and it is our job then to mind it. God knows where that will end up. We are responsible for their carbon.

They are taking it off us at the moment and we are not getting paid for it.

Yes, and in the future they might say, "We gave it to you 20 years ago. You should still have it and you need to be able to have it." The Senator is right. We should first of all decide who we want to own the land. We want the people who live on the land and the people who live in the community to own the land. We do not want people from Dublin owning land in Leitrim. Okay, a certain amount of that is grand. If they come to live in Leitrim - perfect - they are very welcome. That goes for everywhere. We need the local community to function. That is just a healthy environment.

How do we get that mechanism? That is what I am asking Mr. Mitchell. How do we do that?

We have already started to do it by paying people for public goods. We have to recognise all the objectives we want to achieve. We talked about hedgerows. We are willing to pay people for sequestering carbon and for additional stuff but we are not willing to pay for them to maintain carbon sinks and biodiversity. We should be paying people who have good biodiversity to maintain it for stewardship, not just for additional stuff that may not actually be that great. We can solve those problems, and a land observatory will help us to establish all that baseline.

We need to understand that and gather that information. Then we will end up with good policy.

In the meantime how do we stop foreign investors coming in and land grabbing?

We will stop them in Leitrim. We will stop them if have to, with resistance. We want the Government to legislate and protect communities.

To follow up on that point, one of the big reasons a lot of these companies come to invest in forestry is taxation. Every penny they make from any part of the forestation is tax free. I think it was about five or six years ago so that a farmer could get the premiums for a longer period of time than an investor. That is now changed again and the investor can still get it for the same period of time as the farmer. That is causing a huge problem but the big thing is about taxation. I know situations where there are farms and lands not that far from me that were bought by a couple of people who came together. One of them was a consultant in a hospital and another one was a solicitor. They were people who had money. They came together and formed a little group and they went off and they bought the land. When they buy that land they plant it and they get a premium on it for a number of years. Every penny they get on the premium is tax free. They thin the forestry and everything they get for thinning the forestry is tax free. The forestry is finished at the end and they sell the finished timber. Every penny they get for that timber is tax free. The farmer who is farming the land next door who is making very little profit has to pay tax on everything they make from the farm. That is Government policy. If Government policy changed, that would stop the corporate investor from doing that. They were Irish people who did that and that was fine. They took advantage of a system but we also have major corporations and pension funds doing the same. We have all these coming in doing the same and they are all doing it because they are getting tax-free money and they are getting the same benefits and the same incentives as if they were a local person doing it. That is a problem. I think the recent change in that is horrific.

We talked earlier about the family farm. In other words, the farmer on the family farm who is doing forestry is treated the same as if they were a multinational corporation with hundreds of thousands of acres all over the world, even in places like Latin America, which are the kinds of places the corporations have investments. They are buying land in Ireland and getting the same treatment. That is wrong and that needs to change.

I will come back to another point that was raised earlier on transition, land ownership and young people coming into farming. What I have observed over the years is that in most cases, the farmer farmed for whatever number of years while the son or daughter, who was going to take over the farm, went off and got a job, whether in Dublin on the buildings or somewhere else, or became a teacher or whatever. When they reached their 40s, the father was a pensioner and was going to stop and they came back and they ran the farm. They sort of retired into it rather than actually taking it up. That was the tradition down the generations. That tradition has stopped and is not happening as much anymore. What we see is an awful lot of those farms going in different directions. There are big issues around that.

What brought the witnesses here today is a situation where the European Commission has set out that a land observatory should be set up as an institution in the different countries. I want to find out about the funding for that. I think Dr. McCabe made the point about data being so important. Most bad policy comes from poor analysis of bad data. That is where bad policy comes from. First of all, we have to get the data right and then we have proper analysis of that data in order to get the policy right. From what we have heard from the witnesses today there is an issue in getting that.

Where does the funding come from to fund this land observatory? What actions need to be taken? Is it the Department that needs to set it up? Is it the Department that needs to sponsor the witnesses, or whoever, to set it up? How do we move from a situation where the witnesses are coming in here with good ideas and with a position on what they want to see happen to actually making that happen?

There are two actions if we are to take anything home from today's meeting. The first is that our Government should be actively putting its name forward to host this pilot. As to who will pay for this, it would be the Commission. The Commission is funding this pilot. That is the first part. The second part is that, as we mentioned, if we do not get the pilot, we should set up some kind of pilot scheme of an observatory, be it at a parish or a regional level, host it and monitor the output of that over maybe one to two years. That would feed into the observatory. We could look to see if it is something that could be scaled up to a national solution.

Has the group got a business proposal to put forward to the Government to do that?

We can do that, yes.

Is it not viable to set up an EIP similar to the EIPs the Department of agriculture has set up and to have a call for groups to put forward a proposal to look at land availability in Ireland in a small situation?

Can I make a proposal that, having heard from the group here today, the committee would ask the Department to apply for a pilot scheme for a land observatory in Ireland and to get that funded by the Commission?

I would see us having the opportunity to sit down afterwards during the private session to see what the next move should be.

Fair enough.

There is definitely further conversation to be had. For example, we have to discuss the possibility of the compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, the greenways, and the land ownership being taken from farmers for roads and tourism projects as well. There is another stage to the conversation as well.

Going back to the data, as the Deputy said, it is vitally important. Bad policy comes from many things but one of these is certainly bad data. Where we are at the moment is that we have tried to analyse as much as we can the national picture from the publicly-available data. This is where our brick wall is at the moment. However, there may be more data that is collected by State agencies that we do not have access to. The committee may be able to see if this is available. For example, the CSO takes its data on land sales from the stamp duty returns but it excludes various other criteria on land sales that do not pertain to its very particular definition of agricultural land for that use. It does not count transactions for non-agricultural purposes like lifestyle buyers, development land and land identifiable as forestry. What strikes me from this being excluded is that one must first identify it before one can exclude it. This is just natural.

Based on data that is publicly available, we may even have some of the information that would certainly feed into the land observatory in the way the State collects information. This goes back to the points made by Senator Brady and Deputy Lawless. We are in this very frustrating situation. One of the great things about Irish politics is that it is a grassroots kind of politics. Members are on the ground and this is a wonderful resource, which is quite rare in Europe. We know that there are stories around corporate buyers buying up land. We know this but we cannot prove it, so this is the frustration.

We may have a policy outcome that we are hearing about on the ground but it is not there in the statistics and it should be. Then we would know where the corporates are buying land and how many acres they are buying. Then we can actually answer these questions. Our frustration is around being asked questions, even today, where we have been limited in our response not by our skills or background but by the publicly available data we have to draw on given our data limitations. Anything that will push that out would be of huge benefit even in terms of finding out what the national picture of trends is. We may actually have some of the answers even in terms of how statistics are being collected today. However, if I go knocking on that door, I will get one answer and maybe the committee will get another.

I thank the Chair for the opportunity to come back in again. I congratulate the group and wish them well in what they are trying to do. At the end of the day, it is about people like Donal when he started off. We had 30 cows one time and we were all making a living out of it. Now every year, it goes up and up, and every generation is pushing and pushing.

It is not everybody that is pushing for the sake of pushing. It is pushing to make a living out of it. We want to clear that first of all. That is the difference. I can remember. We delivered loose milk in Portlaoise. Thirty cows was a huge number of cows to have at the time. It is just the way everything is being pushed.

The core of this is to ensure how are young people going to be able to get enough land to farm. They need more than when I started off. I raise the competition and deep pockets out there. It is going to be harder for young people to get land. We can leave the family farm for a second, whether the family farm is 80, 100, 150 or 200 acres, because if we want to talk about the family farm, we have to talk about the different enterprises and the returns from the different enterprises. People have come to me and some people criticise me. More than 20 years ago, if I even go back to my days in Macra, people would question whether they wanted to farm full time, and I would say to them if they wanted to farm full time, there was only one way to farm and that was to go into milk, and you wanted to go into winter milk as well to get paid every month for your milk. You are on a level playing ground. Everybody gets the same price, and it is quality after that.

An awful lot of lads were in beef. John was getting this in pounds for the beef and Mary was getting that in pounds for the beef. Lads just were not making money. That is why they all stopped at the suckler business. That is why the cows went, and there was a huge shift over to dairying. Dairying was the only thing that there was money in. There was money in grain,= but farmers need a huge amount of land to be able to make it. There was always money in something that they had to work hard at. There is a lot of work with sheep as well and a good return, but the return has collapsed. Why are so many people going out of sheep? That is the trend. I would love to be able to say that we have answers for that, but we do not have answers.

The Land Commission was mentioned. I have studied the Land Commission. The Land Commission came in. If the witnesses do not mind me saying so, it was fairly easy because there were huge numbers of estates in the country. There were places with 700, 800, 900, 1,000, 1,100 and 1,200 acres of land. They were bought up, and rightly so, by the State, and then given out to farmers. What are we talking about now? A 100-acre farm coming up in an area and the Government buying the farm and doing it. I honestly think that is different when you talk about the old Land Commission.

I just do not have the answers now. The only answer is when Mary is bidding for land, and John has a deep pocket, the Government tells Mary to stay buying the land and it will give her a subsidy or some sort of initial grant maybe over 20 years or something like that, if that is going to be the case. If you wanted to go back on the history of it, that is what happened to the people who came to Meath. They all got dairy farms now. They were all supplying liquid milk to the Dublin market at the time. They were all milking around 25 or 30 cows, in fairness to them. I noticed it in Maynooth mart. The west of Ireland man is a great man to produce a calf at the time of a dairy cow. You would see that trend, but that trend is all history. That is all gone. That is what they did at the time. Is the answer to Mary - I am not saying it to Dr. Curtin - in order to be a farmer, she needs X amount of land? We know that the Teagasc reports would have to be used or whatever. How does Mary farm?

If you talk to everybody, the majority of people who are working off the farm are working off the farm because they cannot make enough money on the farm. They would love to be farming every day. The majority of them do work seven days a week, unlike what Deputy Fitzmaurice said about going on the beer at 12 p.m. on a Friday. I do not know any of them who go on the beer at 12 p.m. on a Friday. I am just making the point. The problem I have is that they work too hard. It is a danger to themselves that they work so hard in to make ends meet at the end of the day. This is a passion for a lot of them. There is pride in it. We see the pride when we go to the mart showing off the calves. There is a huge pride in what we do in producing good sheep, good cattle and everything. That is why I say we lost a whole generation of good stock people because they all had to go into dairy and they were not able to make a living out of it. How you do it I do not know but you can see the trend. Towns are expanding. The agricultural land is being pushed out. No farmer will be able to buy it. Farmers are going to be forced more back out into the country. That is going to happen.

We all know our policy is to build more houses and put pressure on the local authorities. That is why. You are not going to be able to change the mindset of the Irish people. To be fair, if you put up something sale, you are entitled to get the best value for it. I do not think anyone is going to tell a person who is selling an farm they can only get this. That is not going to work in this country. What we can do - and I would love the Chairman to say this - is ask the people who are putting good productive land under solar panels and wind farms to think twice about it. If we had to have a scheme whereby the Government will say it wants the land kept in land use for producing food, but there is land available to put the panels on or something like that, that is the only way forward that I see something happening. I wish the witnesses well in their endeavours.

I thank all the witnesses for their time. I will finish up with one question. Dr. Moore mentioned trees and hedgerows. He mentioned hedgerows more than trees. Removal remains a massive concern nationally and I can see where he is coming from. I know of land owners who do not sleep all night any time wind is promised because of ash dieback trees. This is a serious concern, more so on roadside boundaries. What are his views on that?

Ash dieback has been a huge disaster for the country. I absolutely agree that dead ash trees are a danger. I have heard the same story that the Deputy has that owners are worried about litigation on the road and the costs of removing ash trees and the lack of compensation. However, there has been a wholesale removal of roadside trees in a way that probably exceeds the requirement. We would have some worries about the sense in which all roadside trees are now seen as a hazard, which of course they are not. What we would ask for is for an assessment of trees as to their safety before they are wholesale removed. I absolutely take the Deputy's point that ash dieback is a big problem.

I made reference to the fire blight issue. I want to come back to that because ash dieback was introduced from overseas. The risk of importing fire blight in whitethorn is a similar risk. I want to go back to the point about planting two for the price of one. Our existing hedgerows are so much more valuable than new ones, but of course we need new ones as well. We need nurseries to be incentivised to bring on native plants from native seeds so that they are genetically suitable and will replace the hedges that need to be rejuvenated.

I see where Dr. Moore is coming from, but there is a serious issue out there as regards getting these trees taken down. We are all well aware that there are a lot of large trees. We are probably going to see fatalities if landowners are not supported going forward to take these trees down, especially on roadside hedges or boundaries. More should be done. I know it is not under the witnesses' control, but more needs to be done to support landowners. The more noise the witnesses could make about it might be good to try to put pressure on the Government, which I have been doing, to see whether a system can be put in place to support landowners taking down these trees going forward. I have called for something like a local improvement scheme, which we see done for roads with local authorities. It is something I will push, but I am delighted to get the Dr. Moore's view on it. If any of the other witnesses involved in farming want to give a view, I would love to hear it too.

I want to make a comment on it because I am the chair of the physical environment committee in Leitrim on the county council. We wrote to the Minister about exactly that. We have hedge cutting schemes where there are grants to assist people. They get so much for cutting a kilometre of hedges or whatever. What I would like the committee to think about - maybe it could happen here - is that an arm on a big lorry that carries blocks can get a connection for that to reach up and take trees down from the top. We would like to see funding or support for local authorities that have allowed them to go and survey those hedges. They can then go to the farmers with that information and assist them. It is the farmers' responsibility. That seems to be told that is has to be the farmer who pays for it. They could provide some assistance while protecting good trees.

It will pay for itself because contractors who have a lorry like that will be able to buy that part, which could cost €70,000 or €80,000, and then go and take those dangerous trees out, leave them in the field and move on, and they could do that at scale.

Macra na Feirme had a scheme whereby when farmers retired, there was a lease agreement to encourage young people to move into the family farm beside them. There is visibility and viability within that system. More than 2,000 land leases have been secured in the past number of years. We certainly need to look at such a system if we want to have young people coming into farming and to ensure generational renewal.

The problem with the land mobility service to which the Senator referred is that, notwithstanding that data have not been published, the majority of the farmers who have entered into the scheme are big operators setting up second and third units, rather than it being a case of getting young farmers on the land. That is the deficit with the land mobility service. I agree with him that it is a good system but it needs to be modified to ensure it gets the right people on the land.

Is the scheme not for beginners?

No, anyone can join it.

I thank the witnesses.

The field has been contentious for generations. When it comes up for sale, the farmer next door really is gunning to buy it. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most of them. Their biggest fear is that they will be blown away when it comes to price by somebody who is not interested in farming it.

Do the witnesses see the land observatory operating in conjunction with, or as part of, the likes of Tailte Éireann or the CSO? I expect that a lot of the data they are gathering is already there in different places. I do not want us trying to reinvent the wheel. I am talking about working with existing bodies rather than in place of them.

It is not a question of reinventing the wheel. We have the CSO, Teagasc and a number of other bodies gathering data. In essence, the observatory would be a silo that would house all that data, bring it together and compile it in one report, rather than having to find data in ten different places.

Does Mr. Long see the observatory growing into an organisation that would influence land use policy, such as whether somebody would be able to use it for tillage, trees, solar or whatever other use, or whether a hill currently in wildlife should remain such and not go towards green grass?

There are several issues at this time. We are awaiting the report of the land use review. We are waiting for land to be allocated for nature restoration. We have a problem with young farmers being able to get on the land and an issue with consolidation. Whether it is today, tomorrow or next year, we will have a land observatory. It might not be called that but it will be some model of a monitoring system of land. It will evolve over time. As with all such bodies, we have to start somewhere and that will be the first iteration.

Farmers are very focused on producing food. Very often, the landscape is beautiful and other people from outside see it from the perspective of its beauty and tourist value. There is often the threat of a CPO to build a greenway, road or something else through a landscape. Is that the kind of thing Mr. Long would see the observatory having an interest in or influencing?

I cannot see an observatory being something that would be a threat to farmers. I see it being of benefit to the majority of farmers in enabling family farms to evolve and continue. It goes back to the point that this problem is not going away and it is something on which the Government and our farming population really need to grasp the nettle now because the situation is evolving. Local consumers buy their food in the knowledge that it comes from a family farm.

Does Mr. Long see the observatory focusing entirely on rural ground or does he also see a role for it on urban ground, and not just around the edges of towns? We see vacant plots within urban settings as well.

As I said, we have had interest in that regard. People have contacted me who have an interest in the urban setting. The data around housing is very poor and there is a role for vacant plots in that regard as well. What we are proposing is for the public good. I see it as something for the public good in general.

I do not want to build any unreasonable expectation but, in the time remaining, I ask all the witnesses to specify what their one ask of the committee would be. I will go around the table, with each witness having one minute to respond.

It is about data. We are hitting a kind of brick wall in terms of what is publicly available. There may be more data there; it seems more is being collected than is being released. We do not know what is there. Even to get clarity on that would be very helpful. As we move forward, I would like to see Revenue having a role in this, purely because of the sensitive nature of tax data. We are looking for something that is more of a secondment-type model rather than entirely reinventing the wheel in terms of the data part of it. Certainly, any help in getting more clarity on the types of sales and uses would be extremely useful.

I would ask for a quality payment for hedgerow quality in the next CAP to incentivise better management.

Will Dr. Moore repeat that?

We are nearly out of time. The Deputy will be able to read the transcript of the meeting.

I could not hear what the witness said.

I proposed a quality payment in the next CAP to incentivise better hedgerow management in terms of density, size, volume and so forth.

I thank Dr. Moore.

I have three very simple asks. A small-scale pilot would be helpful to support a land observatory and test its working. I ask that we define what the family farm is. A smaller ask is if the committee is discussing policy around this again in the future, that we be invited back to give an update on our work. We will be working on this as the months go on.

I would like the committee to recognise the threat from institutional buyers. When we are farming, we are all in bubbles in our own region. We need to look at the larger scale and we need good information. Rural Ireland needs to step up and deal with issues such as the definition of the family farm. We must look at it from the other end as well. There is no need for anybody to have more than they need. We must recognise what an external institutional investor is and figure out where they sit, where they should sit and what access they should have to land. That is a big job.

I am asking for support for young farmers. There is the saying that people either inherit, marry into or buy land. However, when people try to buy land now, it is being advertised as investor land and a good investment property. It goes back to supporting the family farm and enabling young entrants to buy land rather than it being made available for investment purposes.

I ask the committee to consider what smaller families have to offer and whether they are prepared to lose that. There is an initiative called the bioregioning initiative whereby there are four returns from the way people farm. There is an economic return, a social return, an environmental return and an inspirational return whereby farmers ask themselves whether they are inspiring the next generation to take over farms and keep farming going. Smaller farmers are contributing an awful lot to the four returns. Are we prepared to lose those four returns as a consequence of the policies we have? We need to put a value on all of them. What is the value of farmers selling food and contributing back to their rural economies? What is the value of farmers farming the way they are and contributing to environmental improvement? The committee should ask itself what policymakers are prepared to do to safeguard that.

Bhí plé an-chuimsitheach againn le cúpla uair a chloig anuas. Gabhaim buíochas le gach duine go léir as ucht an eolais a fuair muid ó na ceisteanna agus freagraí. Land ownership and use is a topic to which we will return. It is a hugely contentious issue. I thank the witnesses for their huge input. The number of questions from members is a clear indication of our interest in the topic.

I want to thank you on behalf of the committee. As there are no further matters for discussion, the committee stands adjourned.