Mr. Ian Lumley:

I thank Deputy Kehoe. I addressed the issue of objecting in response to Senator Paul Daly. I am sure the Deputy will agree that it is important to protect water and air quality and public health and address the ammonia issue, which has such an immediate impact for people in the immediate receiving area, as well as the issue of exposure to air pollutants, whether from ammonia or traffic in a city, which exacerbate asthmatic conditions. More research is needed as to the ammonia impact in rural areas.

With regard to Professor Mitloehner, we are very familiar with his papers and visits to Ireland. I appreciate we are not meant to comment adversely to people outside the Oireachtas committee structure but the arguments that are being advanced have been subject to very significant critique. If we are to address this issue of carbon leakage, we must do so at a global level.

The report that has been tabled to the committee, Towards a New Agricultural and Food Policy for Ireland, is a consensus document that has been done with great deliberation and with the back-up of independent scientists who are not compromised by industry research.

It sets out a positive vision for rural Ireland. Far from being in any way negative towards rural Ireland, we have a large rural membership. Our organisation was formed very much with a concern to advance and enhance rural Ireland. We have taken into protection important properties of heritage and ecological amenity value. We promote ecotourism. We have become directly involved in ecological farming through a property on the Border between counties Tyrone and Monaghan that was bequeathed to us last year. There was a write-up of this in the Irish Farmers' Journalthis week in the context of using extensive grazing to control fire-risk vegetation in a peatland area.

We would like to move away from the polarisation which has been happening over many years whereby the farming-processing sectors, beef, dairy or other areas of agriculture, have, instead of seeking to engage with these real issues, become involved in greenwashing and making spurious arguments that are either unethical or do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. There are claims being advanced that methane is somehow less significant as a greenhouse gas and should be discounted. We have signed up to the methane accounting system under the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and which is monitored by the EPA.

Unless there is serious engagement with the reality of the threat that rural Ireland is now facing with the continued direction of dairy intensification in particular, an enormous risk is posed. We want to see that averted. We already saw what happened with the midlands peat plants. We warned 20 years ago that building new generation peat plants in the midlands was ill-advised-----