Mr. Conor O'Flaherty:

I have one last point. Deputy Cahill asked about livestock. Livestock is an important part of the system. It is important to integrate it into this. Many of us use livestock to graze the cover crops we grow over the winter. We also us mixed herbal lays - for anyone who does not know, a mixed herbal lay is using diverse species and not just being dependent on, for example, rye grasses and clover. I refer to things like herbs and other legumes being in the system. To relate it back to humans, we do not eat a diet of just one or two things and neither should our animals.

A few studies were funded under the SmartGrass project of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. The results that came out recently showed that lambs grazed on mixed herbal lays were actually brought to slaughter quicker. We are implementing these things. There are snippets of help in the system already with research but we feel that there is not enough. We need some more help to get over the problems we are encountering. To prove the environmental benefits that we see and believe are there, we need to put the figures on paper. When the politicians and the policymakers go on to form whatever may be, they will then have concrete evidence that this system is helping and it is helping to achieve targets under the greenhouse gas emissions that we have set.