Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

The Paris Agreement explicitly recognises the special position of agriculture and the need, in a global sense, to match the requirement for sustainable food production with the need to address the climate change issue. There is now a climate action plan at national level that applies sectoral targets and requires us to reduce emissions from agriculture by between 10% and 15% by 2030. A list of actions in the plan, based largely on a marginal abatement cost curve, MACC, produced by Teagasc, can deliver emissions reduction based on a roughly static herd. What we have said to people is we have to tackle those measures early and hard. We have to drive them through a combination of support and regulation. If we do that, it will reflect itself in our view of the impact of the size of the national herd, but the two issues are not mutually exclusive. If we double the size of the national herd, which will not happen, we will increase emissions substantially. We have identified actions-----