Dr. Kevin Hanrahan:

I will talk about the curves in terms of the dairy activity. The analysis that was done in forming the first two carbon budgets was probably done in 2021-22. That was a ten-year forward projection of where we thought international agricultural commodity markets would go and what economic signals we expected farmers to be responding to. At that point, and it is still the case, the markets for dairy products globally and in the European Union were positive. We would have expected, in all three scenarios we looked at, that dairy farmers would continue to respond to those profit-making opportunities down the margin. We had our base case scenario where we had continuing but slowing growth in the medium term in dairy cow numbers. We had a high activity scenario where we had even more dairy cows. We had a lower activity scenario where the rate of growth in dairy cow numbers was very low and effectively flat. We did not look at a scenario where we had large reductions in dairy cow numbers because we thought that if we had to reduce cattle numbers to meet a given quantity of emissions reductions, the most likely place that it would come from would be from lower-profit economic activities, which in a comparative sense and an Irish context are beef cow-----