Mr. John Muldowney:

I thank the Chairman for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. I will make a number of points on agriculture and land use. Professor Fitzgerald stated the agriculture sector needed to define carbon neutrality. This is acknowledged in the national mitigation plan in which we set this out as a priority action. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency put a research call out to tender but no applications were received. We hope the research call will be relaunched this year in order that we can try to address how we define carbon neutrality.

We pitched the discussion on the approach to carbon neutrality in the national mitigation plan on the basis of a three-legged stool. The three areas are: abatement of non-CO2 emissions, namely, methane and nitrous oxide; trying to increase sequestration in terms of forests and soils; and trying to contribute to the energy discussion in terms of contributing to renewable energy supply and improving energy efficiency at farm level. We fully acknowledge the role agriculture has to play in contributing to the national targets. We acknowledge it is a significant component of the national emissions profile and we have put significant funding around abatement options in the rural development programme, which the IFA mentioned. We are doing considerable work on this issue.

We also have a significant research programme examining the research needs of agriculture and what are the options around methane and nitrous oxide. The most recent projects, AGRI-I and SUDEN, which were completed last year, contributed to an updating of the national inventory of nitrous oxide emission factors from the soil. AGRI-I also identified a very successful new fertiliser formulation with stabilised urea that reduces ammonia and nitrous oxide emissions. We will see how well the new fertiliser is adopted by farmers. We also have significant animal breeding programmes which seek to ensure the emissions intensity of livestock is reduced.

On livestock numbers, I do not know from where Professor Sweeney obtained the growth figure of 1 million head. The figures I have for the dairy sector are for a 22% growth in dairy cow numbers, which would suggest an increase in numbers of approximately 200,000 rather than 1 million.