Professor Fiona Doohan:

I will first address the issue about grass versus cereals. It is very different in that we have grass adapted to different regions versus cereals. It is a very different crop as it is perennial and in the ground all year long. The difference stems from the fact that there has been very poor investment in research into cereals. I have been in University College Dublin, UCD, for nearly 20 years and when I came to UCD, Irish agriculture as a whole had very poor investment in cereal research for a time. We suffer because of that. That situation has been rectified to a great extent in different universities around the country. Teagasc has also invested a lot in cereals research in recent years. To be honest, it really is the poor sister of the animal industry. I believe a lot more could be done both in the institutions I have just mentioned and in the work of the regional institutes of technology to deliver varieties of cereal that are adapted to particular regions. There is a lot of improvement that could be done in that respect. What are we doing to address this issue? The best we can do at the moment is to work with companies that produce varieties for similar climatic regions but that is on a gross scale. That would be much more refined by working through projects such as the crop optimisation through sensing, understanding and visualisation, CONSUS, project or CONNECT programmes in centres where we are looking at smart deployment and the regionalised weather of different farms.

That would be best. As to whether we should invest in a national cereal breeding programme, I believe we should certainly be trying to attract an international company that is willing, and which sees an economic benefit, to invest in crops adapted to Ireland, and which wants to have a base in Ireland. In developing and having all the genetic resources this comes back to the question of ownership and GM. The same thing happens with ownership of plant breeders' rights and varieties. The varieties owned by one company are quite distinct from the varieties owned by another company. If we are smart about it we would look at what companies are producing varieties that have been adapted for climates similar to Ireland's. Behind the varieties one sees on sale the companies have a huge resource and data bank of material they use to produce those varieties. This is certainly something that we should be looking at as a nation.

Deputy Martin Kenny spoke about GM, nature and the faster process. The meat and bonemeal scenario is a complex substrate. We do not know very much about it. One can take a gene which we do not know very much about and put it in to another organism. We therefore would have a system we do not understand. Alternatively, we can take a gene that has been researched extensively and put it in to a crop - for example an extra wheat gene into wheat - and we know a lot about it, it is a very well researched gene and much safer, in fact, than some of the other stuff. We must bear in mind that modified crops can now be produced non-genetically with mutagenic agents. This is where seeds are treated with chemicals that cause changes in all sorts of genes. This is a non-GM process and it is used to generate new varieties. When one considers that process versus a process we can trace, where we know exactly what is done and the nature of the gene involved then it is a very different scenario. It is very different to the meat and bonemeal scenario. Scientists, however, have not been good at communicating GM to the public. We could do a lot better in explaining and defending our views. There are great opportunities and potential to do that.