Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for their contributions. In the statement submitted to the committee, reference is made to climate change as follows:

Climate change impacts are real and are felt. In Ireland, we risk exceeding our emissions targets and being fined for doing so. Whatever we do from this moment on must address climate impacts.

Climate change is up there in terms of its importance but there are no solutions in the statement. I have asked questions of many witnesses who have come before this committee and do not expect anyone to provide a silver bullet, including the witnesses here today. However, there has been a 22% increase in dairy production in recent years for obvious reasons. The figures on average farm incomes recently released by Teagasc show that almost all of the income increases can be attributed to increases in profitability in the dairy sector but that is transient, as the witnesses know. Nonetheless, more and more people in the farming community are understandably, for profitability reasons, moving in that direction but dairy production has the greatest impact in the context of climate change because of methane emissions. We face a €455 million fine. The EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, former Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Mr. Phil Hogan, has warned that we are facing huge fines down the line but I do not see any solutions.

I applaud the witnesses for the positivity of their contribution and appreciate that they are working in an area that is critically important. Innovation is critically important in all sectors of our society. All of the headings under which the witnesses spoke today are both important and praiseworthy. However, we face a number of issues that we must tackle. The farming model we have in this country is having a severe impact on our climate change targets and we need to talk about that. We need to figure out how to reduce the level of methane emissions. Is there some scientific way of getting our methane emissions down? This is essential in the context of the move towards increased dairy production, which, as Deputy Cahill pointed out, is a result of the cheap food policy of the EU. That policy is all about reducing the cost of food to the consumer, which, in turn, reduces the amount of money in the pockets of primary producers.

We have spoken a lot about dairy and tillage today but in Donegal, for example, the vast majority of farmers are involved in sheep and beef production up on the hills and on bad land. In that context, the statistics from the Council for the West were absolutely alarming but nobody wants to talk about them. We have seen a 42% reduction in the number of family farms in the west of Ireland in the last 20 years. Almost half of all family farms in the west of Ireland are gone because we are moving towards the intensification of farming.

I defer to Deputy Cahill's expertise as a practising farmer with decades of experience. He has argued that farmers now have to quadruple their farming in order to have the same amount of money in their pockets, which is shocking. We need experts like those here today to talk about that. We need to talk about the fact that the farming model we have in Ireland is driving up our greenhouse gas emissions. I could scream about this at times. We have the European Commission telling us that it will fine us hundreds of millions of euro because of our farming model but at the same time, the economic model presided over by the same Commission forces people in that direction. There is absolute hypocrisy at the heart of the EU's agriculture policy. The EU lectures us, arguably correctly, on our climate change targets while forcing farmers down a particular road because of its cheap food policy.

Are there academic solutions? The presentation from the witnesses was excellent. Reference was made to a multisectoral and cross-departmental approach within UCD. Are there solutions being developed at UCD to the challenges that are screaming at us in terms of agriculture and the model that we have on this island, going forward?