Professor Mark Ferguson:

I will address the future of milk research centre and beef genomics and allow Professor Doohan to gather her thoughts and answer the other questions. I may return to scientific advice.

Funding for the future milk research centre was announced in last week's budget. The programme is just beginning and has been reviewed internationally. It is of excellence and scale and will start in earnest next year. It is funded for at least six years. It is all about understanding the kind of technologies that Professor Linda Doyle spoke about earlier such as the intersection of software, the Internet of things, sensors and so on with the dairy industry. For example, if one wants a milk product with a certain amount of protein and fat to get the optimal price for it in the sports industry, then one traces it back to what kind of grass one needs to grow, what kind of fertiliser one needs to put in precisely, what kind of animals one will need in terms of genomics, what does their microbiome look like, how one will process the milk and so on. It is a completely integrated package of understanding with the application of sensors, the Internet of things, software and big data analytics.

The most important issue, however, is that it has to make business sense. This would be great as a research project but, at the end of the day, somebody has to make money from the investment put into it. One way this can be done is how one thinks about how one creates a high-value product in a more efficient way starting with the issues about which I have just spoken.

There is a good beef genomic database for cattle in Ireland. That is the subject of many of the breeding programmes in place. That needs to be integrated with other programmes, however. Genomics is important in terms of itself, such as the anatomy of the animal but it is all important in terms of its interaction with grass, yield and so forth. There are many issues which can be addressed in that respect and the future milk research centre will do that.

Most scientific advice is required when the situation is not clear. In the case of Roundup, there are what look like potentially opposing views on essentially the same sets of data. That is the norm at a particular stage in science. It is also the norm that when a product is so widely used and there have been so many studies on it, one has more information than on many other products. The European scientific advice mechanism, SAM, has issued a report on glyphosate, Roundup, which looked at the conflicting evidence and attempted to resolve what should be done. The report basically concluded it is generally safe and should be licensed.

One should think about all scientific matters as always bubbling up where there is disagreement. That is how science works. Then there is some kind of consensus view on what is a reasonable approach. One will always find somebody who says something different in every piece of science. That is how it works. While one will not find anybody who thinks the world is square, one will find some contrary view in most matters. What one always looks for is the consistency and coherence of the evidence. That is generally how these matters are resolved. If one wants to take a particular position, one will always be able to cherry-pick some piece of information that supports it.