Speeches by Hanna.

“It was great simply that you knew whether or not you were going to get in. Bear in mind that when covid happened, I had been an MP for two or three months; I was still learning the ropes. It meant that you would definitely prepare, and that was back when I was trying to speak on a number of things. I probably spoke on …”

“Is NI Water preparing for that, and does it feel that it will be able to make the necessary changes?”

“Last year, your CEO said that there was no point in prosecuting Northern Ireland Water for environmental failures. I suppose the sense was that it did not have either the ability or the resources to address them. Do you understand whether there will be any new mechanisms or approaches coming to enforcement on Northern …”

“Very much so, but the issue is that we do not have multiple five-year periods. I suppose it is a political question, and it is unfair to put it on you. On this, house building and all sorts of other issues, day in and day out, we are at a crisis. We are waiting for an investment strategy from the Executive and for this…”

“Yes, within the bounds of the allocated funding that you have—and we are getting into how you are trying to deal with a problem without the resource. Do you have any sense of a plan from Northern Ireland Water or the Minister to address the wider funding issues, and to solve the problem that we have with this environme…”

“What do you mean by the Environment Agency “being obstructive”?”

“Do you think there is adequate on-farm support and co-design with farmers in some of the available schemes?”

“And many others beside. We are aware of that. I wanted to talk about the supports. I do not dispute that most farmers want to make this work. Are there adequate supports? I know there is a bit of a gap between the likes of the Farming with Nature programme and some of the group schemes that are coming to an end. Are yo…”

“I have said this before. There is a lot of money being made, not necessarily by family farms in Northern Ireland, but there is a lot of profit in the chain linked to land use around the lough. There are close to hundreds of millions of pounds of profit being made from that intensification.”

“I think very similarly. We know that there are different rules if it is legislation or other types of debate. Sometimes there is a lot of space for the early speakers. I have had exactly that experience, many’s the time, of trying to compress a complex argument, when you might have known in advance that you would be sp…”

“When you say fixed voting time, do you mean the guillotine of the debate ending?”

“I do not think those are two fair proposals. Like Ellie, I would go for a hybrid. We do not have endless debate for almost anything else, so there would be no reason to protect it in this scenario either.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“I think there is a lot to commend that, and it is the case that you get slightly tweaked iterations of the same speech, back and forth. People perform for their clip rather than having that idealised form of debate. It is important to say that I think we have all had the experience where something is important enough t…”

“But I suppose—sorry.”

“We’re having a debate here.”

“I am not trying to be blamey, because I want to talk about Farming with Nature and the supports that are and are not available. I believe that farmers, particularly family farms, are trying to achieve the same balance. I am trying to see where there is agreement that that intensification has been a contribution.”

“Other factors are at play, but is it fairly indisputable that that intensification without mitigations—and I am going to come on to some of those mitigations and the support that is needed—has contributed to a decline in water quality?”

“You would not dispute that intensification of farming over that period—I think they said since 2012, but over the last decade—has reversed some of the water quality improvements.”

“Thank you very much to all of you. William, in the Lough Neagh action plan, DAERA estimates that 62% of the phosphorus pollution comes from agricultural sources. Is that your understanding?”