Philip Boucher Hayes

A policy that would require government to be brave and to take a side.

Cattle farmers or wind farmers or put both together.

Just one month after my first visit to Michael, disaster struck.

Michael!

A fortnight of very wet weather raised the water table, then three weeks' worth of rain in one day, which had nowhere to soak away to.

The developers of the wind project acknowledge in their planning application that if it goes ahead, the water table could be raised as a result of their groundworks by as much as 15 centimetres.

But because land is an attractive investment option, it means, increasingly does it, that the value of land or the price of land bears absolutely no resemblance to the profits that agriculture can generate off it.

That'd be six or seven times.

And the fear for you is what if this wind farm project goes ahead?

You're talking about having to put the whole farm on stilts basically, aren't you?

Unhelpfully for everyone, there is once again no national policy around this kind of land use.

Where to build, where not to build, how to manage drainage to rivers along the whole length of the river, not just up to a county boundary, till the water becomes somebody else's problem.

And the hope would be that if we had one strategy to try and make all of these individual figures more coherent, that it would smooth out the wrinkles that you're talking about here.

The floodwater receded within a week and the grass in most of Michael's fields recovered.

Spring brought some very different news to the farm.

Four years ago, officials from the Department of Heritage approached Michael to monitor the curlew and lapwing populations living on the farm.

Earlier this year, the farm was brought into the Breeding Waders EIP, a Department of Agriculture and NPWS funded scheme to save our most vulnerable species of ground nesting birds from local extinction.

Indeed not.

Pat O'Toole, political editor of the Irish Farmers Journal.

Thank you.