Artificial Intelligence
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-29
============================================================

Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South

We continue to monitor the latest technology and the opportunities and the amount of work under way in this area is significant. The National Agricultural Soil Carbon Observatory is part of my Department's strategic investment in soil carbon research. Funding was supplied to the establishment of the observatory by supplying the scientific infrastructure to measure GHG fluxes from soils under agriculture management. There are 28 flux towers across a range of soil types. The observatory will place Ireland at the forefront of EU carbon sequestration research and enable Ireland to better quantify soil carbon emissions and sinks from agricultural land on peat soils, enable mitigation measures to increase carbon sequestration to be included in the national inventory, participate in the EU Integrated Carbon Observatory System, ICOS, network, and enable Ireland to benefit from the 2018 EU effort sharing regulation.
The Teagasc signpost programme has a critical role to play. Our national soil sampling programme has also played a role, as have farm carbon research projects. I mentioned earlier the Department of agriculture has the fourth biggest State Department spending on research. A lot of it is in the areas of climate mitigation and carbon.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-29