Professor Alan Matthews:

The statement is valid. There is no other European member state where agriculture has such a high share of the emissions in the national profile, at 35%. On a global level, you are looking maybe at New Zealand as a country with a similar agricultural profile but very different in other respects. There is a much greater reliance there on forestry offsets.

At a more regional level, there are some other comparable countries. Scotland, for example, would not be that far away from Ireland in terms of its share of agricultural emissions and clearly so would the North of Ireland, but at a member state level, we face a fairly unique challenge in terms of agriculture.