Nature and farming coexisting is cornerstone of NRL

Paul O’Brien has a dream for how the Nature Restoration Law could be applied. In his dreams it would offer farmers an incentive to embrace a brand new agri-environmental scheme, with guaranteed funding secure into the future. Whether the farmers choose to enter it willingly, or ignore it completely would be down to them.

However, Paul is also haunted by how past environmental schemes have malfunctioned or been hastily shelved.

The sheep farmer is at home on his farm on the Cats’ side of the Kilkenny Carlow border. when the Celt phones on Friday morning.

“We’re not against nature restoration,” assures Paul of the IFA’s position.

“We most certainly believe it needs to happen in some shape or form. How do you design that shape or form? We will know by probably May/June of next year. Clearly if you are raising ambition, that needs to be followed by money.”

Paul’s recent experience as national environmental chair for the IFA, and his impressive CV with COPA COJEGA, which represents 20 million EU farmers, means he will be at front of the IFA’s negotiating team.

He even held the chair the Biodiversity element of a working party oof COPA COJEGA which considered the implications of the Nature Restoration Law (NRL).

Paul views the NRL in the context of ‘Green Deal’ which gave rise to it. Paul asserts it was “not robustly tested”.

“It was fitting that the only real economic evaluation of the Green Deal was done by the United States Department of Agriculture - it wasn’t done by the EU bodies.”

To his mind Green Deal focused purely on its environmental merits, to the neglect of farming community.

“There was no real evaluation from an economic and social point of view, it was all one sided: environmental.”

“I fundamentally believe, as a farmer we do need to raise our game [environmentally], but it goes back to the point - if you do not bring farmers with you on a journey, and you alienate them, that’s the worst possible place to be.

“If we are to have a just transition for agriculture, and a transition to improve biodiversity, then you devise a policy that brings farmers with you, and at the moment I don’t see that.”

The passing of the NRL at EU level in February 2024 grabbed the headlines, despite the ambitions of the EU Commission’s original proposals in 2022 being “watered down” as environmentalist Grace Carr of the Irish Wildlife Trust (IWT) puts it.

“There was such fanfare and it was so exciting because it’s the first piece of legislation that’s come out in 30 years,” Grace explains.

The previous legislation was the Birds Directive and Habitats Directive of the 1990s. These laws have achieved only limited success.

Grace notes that over 80% of EU habitats are regarded as “in bad ecological condition”.

In the Irish context the last report of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) on the health of habitats, completed in 2019, made for grim reading. A new NPWS report, which will chart improvements and/or declines over the last six years, is expected this June. It will help inform the NRL debate.

“While the Habitats Directive was about protecting areas, this new legislation will be about restoring areas to create resilient habitats forests and marine environments,” enthuses Grace.

Fintan Kelly is the Agriculture and Land Use Policy and Advocacy Officer with the Irish Environmental Network (IEN).

He laments that as the NRL passed through the EU, “most of the debate” in Ireland was distorted and focussed on rewetting.

“Rewetting would more accurately be called water table management - it doesn’t imply that the water has to come to the surface,” assures Fintan.

He notes that the “actual targets” in the NRL up to 2030 are “far less ambitious” than those in existing Irish policy, pointing to successive climate action plans which aim to rewet peat soil to reduce carbon emissions.

“There is also the Land Use Review that’s happening at the moment - Phase 2 is finishing, and that basically is concluding that we need to have massive scale rewetting,” observes Fintan.

Somewhat surprisingly the IFA’s Paul O’Brien echoes that sentiment on rewetting, but from a different position:

“I think there has been an over emphasis on rewetting if I’m being honest because I think most of the rewetting targets are going to be met by Bord Na Mona,” he says.

Paul’s concerns over rewetting it is limited to ensuring where a farmer who does opt for such a measure, doesn’t impact neighbouring farms.

Getting past the hulaballoo on reweetting, Fintan observes of the NRL: “Many of the targets aren’t really new, they’re implementation targets,” and recalls Ireland’s poor record on implementing the Birds Directive or Habitats Directive.

“So the NRL identifies the implementation gap - it says Ok you have to hit restoration targets for 2030, 2040, 2050.”

While there has been relative radio-silence since NRL passed in Brussels, this week sees the opening phase of the discussions that will shape how Nature Restoration Law (NRL) will actually work in Ireland.

A Leaders Forum organised by the National Parks and Wildlife Service is underway in Dublin, which includes approximately 100 people with varying interests, including the environments, agriculture, tourism and industry.

Those discussions and findings will be sifted through by the more streamlined Independent Advisory Committee, whose proposals will then go to the minister May/June 2026 who will bring it to the cabinet for a decision.

Both Paul and Fintan have seats on the Independent Advisory Committee.

The Irish plan will then get frisked by Europe to ensure consistency of ambition across the Member States in September 2026 all going well.

With expected to-ing and froing, the legislation will only be bedding down just before the first landmark of 2030.

IWT’s Grace Carr is a participant in that Leaders Forum.

She doesn’t expect the NRL to have a visible impact on the countryside any time soon.

However she wants to see the groundwork done.

“It’s getting the ball rolling because if we don’t do something now, 2030 will come, 2040 will come and everything will be getting more degraded; soil health is going to be impacted will which affect farming issues,” says Grace.

“If we want to hit the 2030 targets they need to be starting to put in measures now,” she says outlining the timeframe for the drafting of legislation.

Both the IFA’s Paul and environmentalist Fintan are eyeing up public land to meet short term aims to 2030.

“We have 7% of the country owned by Coillte, one per cent owned by Bord na Mona,” says Fintan. “There’s huge scope there for ambitious nature restoration which would have massive benefits for nature and local communities with eco-tourism potential.

“Coillte planted up a lot of deep peats, a lot of blanket bogs where they just aren’t economical - the trees aren’t supposed to be there. Those trees have to be cut down to harvest the wood, and then we can enter into a conversation about what happens next.”

IFA man Paul O’Brien’s concerns are rooted in past experience of REPS, and the ongoing ACRES débâcle. He recalls how the government declared both biodiversity and climate crises, but then oversaw an agri-environmental scheme that couldn’t match farmers’ ambitions.

“It’s the governments’ number one environmental scheme and it’s been an absolute mess. I feel there was an opportunity to do considerably more.”

Paul quotes a phrase from Dr Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech where the civil rights leader spoke of “the urgency of now.”

“If something is so, so important, everything should be shifted and moved to design something to deal with that emergency,” Paul opines.

“When you have the Taoiseach of the day stand up in the Dáil in May 2019 and say we have a biodiversity crisis, we have a climate crisis, and here we are six years later and we haven’t people in that ACRES scheme, and we have 2,000 farmers who still haven’t been paid for 2023 - then you have to say, clearly the problem isn’t with the farmers’ ambition, it’s the ambition of the state to deliver a key product that farmers can absolutely embrace.”

While environmentalist Fintan takes heart from the demand by farmers for ACRES, he despairs of how the expanded scheme was administered.

“The farmers are delivering, the ecologists are delivering but the problem is the Department hasn’t delivered. “Their IT systems have been a disaster - their ability to get payments on time has been a disaster.”

Paul puts the issue in even starker terms: “If ACRES were to stop today and start up tomorrow, I’m not sure how many would actually go into it.”

Fintan insists administration issues must be addressed, and wants attractive schemes backed by many more carrots than sticks.

“I would like to see things happen in a way that benefit farmers - less bureaucracy, more focus on getting results and there’s hopefully greater appreciation among farming leadership that this is an important thing for family farm viability - there’s many aspects to this, it’s not just about birds and the bees, it’s about keeping farm gates open.”

Fintan details how he envisages the NRL working in practice.

“We’re not going to have farmers queueing up en masse saying, ‘I want my entire farm turned into a native woodland’.”

He gives the example of a suckler farmer in Leitrim with a species rich grassland.

“That farmer will have access to a results based scheme and hopefully we will see a benefit in the quality of that habitat over time. That’s what I would see the NRL meaning for the average farmer.

“For the intensive dairy farmer in derogation, the NRL is not going to probably affect them, because the amount of money available from argi-environmental schemes isn’t of any interest to them, because they are making so much money anyway and they just don’t have the habitats that would fall under the NRL.”

Past experience doesn’t fill Paul with confidence.

He recalls how farmers were stung by the designation of former farmland as Special Area for Conservation or Special Protection Area.

“Money was there for certain period of time, and then the money stopped but the designation still stays in place, devaluing land, and the ability of farmers to make money on that land was greatly reduced. We have to learn from our mistakes.

One agri scheme that Irish farmers did embrace was REPS which had over 70,000 signed up in its heyday.

“In 2008, when the downturn happened, one of the first things that was challenged was the REPS scheme at the time. REPs 4 money, which was higher than REPS 3 money, was immediately pulled down to REPS 3 level, and they stopped new entrants going into the programme. What we can’t have is the tap on/tap off,” he says.

“This is twice this has happened in my life time in farming - it is something that could happen again, but it most certainly shouldn’t happen.”

As such Paul insists “new money” has to be ringfenced, and yet he notes that since the Green Deal of 2019, there is greater pressure on EU budgets due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a greater emphasis on militarisation in light of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy stances.

Echoing these very same points Fintan states: “Where my concerns would overlap with farmers’ concerns, and where the rubber hits the road is the money.”

While Ireland is in the unusual space of having budget surpluses, he suspects the government could find wriggle room for financing the NRL is by persuading the EU to allow them to loosen “co-funding measures”.

“We can only advise farmers on the history, and the history has been less than positive when it comes to continuous funds for environmental schemes,” he Paul laments.

Those are challenges which lie ahead, but there’s clearly a consensus between the environmentalists and farmer reps. It’s enough to give optimism that both farmers and the environment can benefit from NRL.

“It is still a really important law and if it is implemented correctly it will make a really big difference,” concludes Grace.

We can but dream.