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Chapter 1: What new land is needed for renewable energy by 2030?
And all of that is happening on just one farm in one county. Here, though, is what we need to find room for nationally. New land that's going to be needed by 2030. 120,000 hectares for wind turbines. 130,000 hectares of grassland for anaerobic digesters. 11,000 hectares for solar panels, 65,000 hectares of re-wetted bogs, 70,000 hectares of new land under tillage. That's just by 2030.
In the longer term, a half a million hectares of new forestry is going to be needed to achieve a government target of 18% forestation. All that new land is the equivalent of Carlow, Louth and Kildare in their entireties. So where is it going to come from? There is a body of work that has been done here to try and square all of these circles. It's called the Land Use Review.
It was completed in early 2025, but it hasn't been seen since then. Pat O'Toole is political editor of the Irish Farmers Journal. He's been asking for a very long time when we might see this report. Pat, good morning. Why is it needed?
Well, it's needed because of what you have just highlighted, all these issues. separate national objectives, some of which have to do with the National Climate Action Plan, some of which have to do with broad environmental improvement, some of which have to do with targets like the tillage one, where we have strategic targets for agriculture. So we have all these objectives, but they don't mesh.
They're all competing for the same acre. So we have this land report, which we could call Schrodinger's report, because until it is revealed and until it prioritises one land use option over another, which means the less preferred land use option has to be binned, and that's a failure of a national strategy, until that moment, all things are possible off that magic acre.
Is that the problem here, that as soon as you put, you prioritise one use of land over another, you're going to be putting some people's noses out of joint?
Yeah, that's one of the problems. And the other problem, of course, is that as soon as you prescribe land use, because certain land types are more suitable for certain uses. And, for instance, there's a debate among farmers as to whether it's appropriate to take very good, productive farmland out of
agricultural use and put it into solar when less productive farmland is as effective for solar, but not as effective for fruit production. So, you know, that's a land use priority that is logical. But culturally in Ireland, we're hostile to planned land management. And land ownership rights in Ireland are high by international standards. And that's partly because of our history.
So that is an issue as well, that any planned land use objectives and strategy will put everyone's nose out of joint because no landowner wants to be told what to do with their own plot of land.
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Chapter 2: Why is the Land Use Review considered essential?
And we're seeing Declan O'Brien had a revealing story in this week's paper in the Farmers Journal where more and more of the money that is going to support afforestation is going to non-farmers. So farmers are no longer able to buy land against other interests because land is an attractive investment option.
Because of the very pressures on land use that are there, people realise that owning land in the future may be something that gives you leverage and power.
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.
Absolutely. There's no other business that sees people as asset rich and cash poor anymore. So that's absolutely the case. And the reality is that if you buy an acre of land and farm it, you're paying tax on the first euro you earn. Whereas if you buy an acre of land and using the system that's there, you rent it out.
you benefit from the tax release there for leasing of land, which was meant to be for generational renewal. But actually, it's now become probably something that's counterproductive.
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.
Yes and no, because the famous story of Solomon and the baby, where King Solomon was approached by two women claiming to own one baby and his solution was to cut the baby in half, which would, of course, kill the baby. We're kind of in that situation. Any politician who tries to prescribe land use for best purpose in the national interest will probably have to kill thousands of livelihoods.
and take farmers out of what they're doing at the moment against their will. So that's not going to be simple.
Indeed not. Pat O'Toole, political editor of the Irish Farmers Journal. Thank you. Solomon, on this particular occasion, or one of three Solomons, is Government Minister Dara O'Brien. I asked him in November of last year, was he sitting on this land use review or would he publish it?
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Chapter 3: How do competing land use objectives create challenges?
But actually, no. Land use and flood risk are absolutely inseparable, but we have been treating them as separate problems. So how we use the land absolutely directly determines what happens in the river systems downstream. It dictates how water moves through the catchment.
Intensive farming with significant drainage, with compacting soils, speeds up how water reaches the river and creates worse problems.
So what you're saying, Mary, is that you don't need 5% of the land in every river catchment on a permanent basis, only to use it temporarily at moments of intense rainfall?
Absolutely. So that is the idea. It's this idea that we would work with private landowners, which include farmers, to talk to them about the reality of what this kind of approach means and reassure them that we are not flooding the land.
What we are doing is going to work with them to work on a catchment scale to reduce the flood risk together and talk to them about how they could be compensated for this issue.
And Mary, if we don't do this, if we don't integrate this into a national land use plan, what happens?
I think it's very serious in terms of the consequence for meeting lots of our regulatory duties. Could I just mention that we have the land use review, but we also have the nature restoration plan. And my view would be that these need to be read as a single document. Both plans mention river restoration, floodplain rewetting, riparian habitat recovery. they all appear in both frameworks.
So it would be an absolute tragedy if the land use review was read in a silo where the nature restoration plans, it was exactly what you were speaking with your previous guest in that these lands have multifunctions. And I do think there will be people who will have to have severe actions, but there's also loads of opportunity for collaboration here.
Professor Mary Burke, thank you very much. Ronan Power is Chief Executive of Solar Ireland, the representative body for the solar industry. At points in the course of the last week, over a third of Ireland's electricity was generated by solar panels. So good morning, Ronan. A lot done by your sector. Obviously, though, you have a lot more that you want to do.
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Chapter 4: What cultural factors impact land management in Ireland?
And it was ignored. Explain something to me, though. We have special protection areas for birds. We have things like what we just heard about there, the breeding waders, EIP, hot zones. Is that not enough or do we need a national level plan like yours that joins all of those areas up?
We do, but we need more than that, Philip. When you're talking about speeding things up, we need a lot more data. I know people say there's enough data, but we actually need to have the data collated in one place in a national repository where people can access it and research it. There's surveys going on all around the country and not everybody has access to that data.
We need ecologists in all the local authorities and at every section of regulatory planning. And I have a whole list of things that we need government to really do to try to include better implementation. But the problem is now we still have developer-led wind farm planning onshore, which ends up getting stuck in the planning process where
If this sensitivity mapping is done, then perhaps it wouldn't be just, you know, if it was adhered to, that it wouldn't be just, you know, people making deals on the ground.
Everybody working at cross-purposes to each other. I understand you. Una Duggan, Head of Policy at Birdwatch Ireland. Thank you very much. It's very Lord of the Rings, really, isn't it? We need a plan to unite all of the other plans. More after this.
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