Professor John FitzGerald:

On the Citizens' Assembly recommendation that a body be established to legally enforce implementation of climate strategy, the Climate Change Advisory Council should not be given such responsibility.

The council is there to provide independent advice. The four statutory members could not be on it under those circumstances. It is about having the independence to say what we think is best without having to enter enforcement. Once one is into enforcement then one is into the democratic process, which is very different. For four years in the last decade I was on the Northern Ireland Authority for Energy Regulation. Under law, the mission of the regulator there was as an enforcement body. We were there to do that. The law said we were to ensure that consumers, in the long run, had a secure supply of electricity at minimum cost. This gave the regulator a clear objective, given to us by the legislature. The problem was that it also said we were to do something on the environment, which was difficult because as regulators it was up to us to decide whether to impose more costs on consumers in Northern Ireland in order to benefit the environment. I believe that distribution issues are for the Oireachtas to deal with and are not for the regulator. Regulators should have a clear mission on what they are to do. In certain areas one can see how setting up a body might help with implementation but it would be very different from the regulator. That is not our branch. One would be starting from scratch in setting up another body to do that. I am not sure that the failure so far of the Oireachtas to act, or of successive Governments to act, would have helped. The legislators are the experts on that, not me.

I will now turn to the economic effects on agriculture. We will spend the next six months considering this aspect in detail. When I was appointed as chairman of the council it was my understanding of the science that I was going to have to tell farmers they would have to get rid of their cows. It turns out, however, that the scientific evidence on this issue is more complicated. Methane lasts some 12 years in the atmosphere, and perhaps Phillip can elaborate on this. This means that agriculture needs a more nuanced solution. It is not a get-out-of-jail card. Agriculture has to make a major transformation if Ireland is to decarbonise. The first problem is that we need to define the objective for 2050 and what carbon neutrality means for agriculture. In the case of carbon dioxide it is easy to define. A tonne of carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for 100,000 years or indefinitely. It continues to do damage, not just when it is emitted and not just for 12 years; it remains for 100,000 years. We have to get rid of all carbon dioxide. The same goes for nitrogen oxide, NOx, which presents a big issue with agriculture's use of fertiliser. We must eliminate it also. With regard to methane, if Ireland had the same number of cows as there were in 1841, the impact on global warming would be the same as it was in 1841.

We need to define the objective for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and I would like the Department to spell out what the science means. There is a problem in that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, will issue a paper on this in August 2019, which will define it. Whatever Ireland defines as an objective must be consistent with the IPCC's definition. I understand that the change in the science will be reflected in the IPCC report and we need to reflect that change. I refer to a possible result of this. Farmers make money from dairy farming. Dairy cows are a priority. Research shows that farmers make pretty much nothing, net, from beef cattle. While beef cattle and dairy cows are biologically linked, if we de-emphasise beef and got out of beef production Ireland would save on the methane emissions, which might give more scope but saving on methane emissions is not the issue; the issue in agriculture is land use. The issue is about changing land use. Today's Financial Timescarries an article on what Britain plans to do in agriculture after Brexit. There are many issues around sucking the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere through changes in land use. Ireland also needs to look at this. Perhaps the CAP reform will incentivise it. For example, if it costs a farmer to have cattle on their drumlin soil in Cavan, research suggests that they may make more money switching to biomass forestry. This could be part of the solution.

There are a lot of problems for farmers in doing that, however. If I planted trees, I would be dead before I could get the benefit from them. We need a suite of policies that move agriculture onto a sustainable path. We need to define that path. It will involve some wins but there will also be costs. Teagasc published a very interesting suite of policies, some of which are cheap and can make a real difference, for example, on changes in fertiliser use. It might be possible, although the advisory council has not decided on the issues, that the price of a particularly damaging fertiliser might be made more expensive. Alternatively, we might have a carrot instead. Another measure that is specifically mentioned in today's Financial Times for Britain is flooding wetlands so they absorb more carbon. Farmers are not going to do that unless there is an incentive. That might be an area where we might have carrots. We do not have a detailed suite; it is for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to come up with the policy and objectives. There are solutions that leave agriculture productive and farmers earning an income and that could be consistent with a sustainable future, but we need to define the path.

On a stand-alone Department of climate - this is my personal view - one of the reasons we have made so little progress in the last two years has been the dislocation caused by moving climate from one Department to another. Key officials who had the expertise, for example, in developing scenarios and modelling what the effects of policies would be, did not transfer from one Department to the other. The current Department has had to develop the expertise from scratch. Switching again to another Department will delay progress for another two years. It may work in theory but, in practice, is this what we want? We want an administration that has the expertise and can deliver rather than to be constantly changing the administration. That will make problems, not solve them. That is my personal view. I do not know if Ms Burke wants to say something on the question.