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Chapter 1: What are the current challenges in land use in Ireland?
This is Countrywide on RTE Radio 1.
Hello, good morning. You're very welcome to the programme. Between now and nine at sixes and sevens in Offaly, fleeting fritillaries in Kilt Air and thank you but no thank you in Roscommon. Very, very, very good morning to you. I hope that you are well. Do stay with us between now and nine. Two things happened this week. More weird and wonky weather. It has never been that hot this early.
Pleasant weird weather, I will grant you, but wonky nonetheless. And then the day after records were smashed, the EPA released a mountain of numbers showing that we are only in the foothills of the mountain that we have to climb to address global warming.
And there are things that government's critics say could be done to speed up delivery, but government haven't done to avoid losing votes or antagonising allies. And this absence of a national plan on how we use land is having real life consequences, they say, on farms all over the country. Cue our very first farm visit of the morning.
Over the course of the last year, I have visited one beef farm in County Kildare on and off several times. It's next door neighbour to a proposed wind farm project of nine turbines, each of them 180 metres in height. Locals mostly feel that renewable energy projects absolutely have to happen, but worry that this is not the right one in the right place.
The developers obviously feel that they are in the right place. I first went to this farm last September.
The radio on for the ladies that they're not too alone. So I went to college over in Germany and we kind of learned there that, it was funny, we did a trial where when you play classic music to cows, they tend to be calmer. Is that for real now? I saw, like, we can go into them. Our cows are very calm now. They're very calm from the get-go.
play specifically classical music as opposed to talk radio or pop or hip-hop?
Now, what I did before, because I'm a big... I love dance music. I played dance music here, but I had to stop because they were jumping around and running around.
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Chapter 2: How is climate change affecting agricultural practices?
Due to the noises as well that they can hear that we potentially not can hear.
I also spoke to farmers with livestock grazing amongst turbines. They reported no loss of yield or thrive in their herds. But in farmer WhatsApp groups, claims to the opposite effect are being shared that suggest cows will and do have a stress response.
So that would mean for us, the likes of up there now, I wouldn't be able to put my cattle in.
Ultimately, we will need wind turbines on about 2% of the country's land. A clear national policy based on sound evidence would be helpful to everyone in deciding how land should be used. 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 river couldn't take it anymore. So due to the rain, then the drains back up.
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Chapter 3: What are the concerns regarding the proposed wind farm project?
So we actually were in the yard and we could actually watch the water rise into the drains and then the water just came in.
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.
So this is the first time now again since... 2019. 2019 was bad. 2016 was really bad. You know the avenue you came through? That was flooded and the people were evacuated. The problem is the river fills with silt through the bog and then the river gets slower and slower and then the river can't take it anymore. So is that four or five times in the last 20 years? I'd say more.
That'd be six or seven times. And the fear for you is what if this wind farm project goes ahead?
So according to their documents, the water level will rise. Like 10 centimeters is that much. Like if you add that to here, that shed is going to be underwater. The office will be underwater as well in the front.
You're talking about having to put the whole farm on stilts basically, aren't you?
Yeah, basically.
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. 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.
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Chapter 4: How do wind turbines impact livestock and farm operations?
putting more carbon back into the atmosphere than we're taking out of it through our forestation as we harvest mature forests. So that's going to impact on all those other targets you talked about. They'll probably all have to be pushed upwards, creating even more pressure on the land bank.
Pat, I left out one critical thing from all of those land uses, and that is those livestock farmers who are now going to want to expand their land holding in order to be able to spread their nitrates a little bit more evenly. What's going to happen to the price of land in the course of the next few years?
Well, you'd say it's going to go up, but there are troubling... trends there around, I mean, cattle farming is not going through a good year. And certainly what we can say for sure, Philip, is that there's more and more pressure on farmers to get extra land. But the ability to pay is a problem.
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. 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.
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Chapter 5: What evidence exists about the effects of turbines on animal behavior?
It's a really good piece of work. And I agree with you that it's important that it's published, that it's out there and people can see the report itself. But more importantly, what comes from it. It's not just within my gift to publish it, I'd say as well. There are two other government departments as well involved in this.
Well, they're deferring to you when
Well, I can actually tell you that I want to publish before Christmas, and I intend that it will be.
That was in November. Yesterday, his department told me that it was being held onto in government for further consideration. Mary Burke is a professor of geography in Trinity College. She has told this programme before that adapting to the kind of flooding that Michael Miley's farm suffered is going to require installing flood solutions on about 5% of the land in every river catchment.
Good morning to you, Professor Burke.
Good morning.
Do we need a national land use plan that integrates flood adaptation right into its core? Or can we, should we just leave this to the county councils?
We so need it to be incorporated. Rivers need space. And optimistically, this review could finally give it to them. So for a long time, Ireland has managed its floods where they happen. I'm advocating, along with several other people, that we should be managing them where they start. So upstream.
And this land use review could shift that conversation from the towns and cities that are enduring these floods upstream where it belongs. Because upstream we have floodplains and grasslands and intact river margins. And That's not wasted land. They are infrastructure that can be used to protect communities downstream.
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Chapter 6: Why is a national land use policy essential for Ireland?
And we need to accelerate, right? We're off the back of an incredible week in terms of records where Solar has clearly shown that it can deliver at scale to the need for electricity in Ireland. And we need to deploy more. I think, you know, we're looking at 0.1% of the land in Ireland would be under use by solar by 2030 if we were to hit our climate action targets.
So we need to accelerate that, but we need to give clarity to people as to how we're going to use that land and what our goals are in terms of deployment.
And how different do you find the approach of each county council as you lodge your planning applications now?
Oh, it's largely different across all of the county councils.
I mean, I think that we need to get clarity and consistency across the county councils rather than engaging in an air code lottery, if you want to call it that, where if we can get consistency in the approach to both planning approvals and land use, then we're actually going to see an increase in deployment and an increase in public buy-in because we're going to have certainty and a view as to how this is all going to work.
Ronan Parr, Chief Executive, Solar Ireland. Thank you very much for that. Una Duggan is Head of Policy at Birdwatch Ireland. Birdwatch Ireland was very far ahead of the game when 12 years ago they drew up national land use maps of habitats occupied by key bird species. Una, what happened to that plan?
Well, what we did, Philip, was we produced and published in 2015 a map for terrestrial avian sensitivity to onshore wind. So what that did was identify areas of low, medium and high sensitivity of wind firms to wind. birds in known locations.
So we mapped the distribution of the birds and then assessed their ecology as to how are they affected by the different activities that come with construction and operation of a wind farm.
So basically, in cruder terms, you're saying that you were mapping hooper swans breed here and then fly from there to here to feed along this route. So we shouldn't be building anything along those routes.
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