Dr. James Moran:

Where do we start: airing our frustrations, or not? We need to understand that a lot of this is driven by policy. When we talk about land use in Ireland, with almost 75% of the land either in forestry or agriculture, this controls a lot of the direction. That is really our common agricultural policy. For many decades, this has been driven by quality food production at low prices. It must be remembered that we were coming out of near famine situations after the Second World War when the policy was first devised. From the 1980s, it was recognised that we were getting into overproduction. There were wine lakes, butter mountains, grain stores full to the brim and so on. It was recognised that there were environmental consequences and societal consequences of restructuring of rural areas as result of that policy. It had been a very successful policy in feeding Europe at low food prices for approximately 40 years.

Then we started to know about the science of the environment, and we are now at COP26. After the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, we had the MacSharry reforms to try to bring in the environmental component into CAP. Sometimes we feel like we are on the deck of the Titanic. We found out a couple of nautical miles back in 1992 that the iceberg is there. The captains of the ship and of industry are ploughing on and saying that the ship will survive any hit from an iceberg. That is how it feels at the moment. We are at COP26 and we feel as though the iceberg is there in front of us. We are possibly at a situation where we can no longer turn the ship and we are going to career straight into it. Then it is all about how do we adapt and evacuate to lifeboats at that stage.

The frustration is that the CAP has tried for 30 years to bring in environmental considerations. There has been very slow progress on that. One of the issues is that in the preamble to CAP it is trying to work towards a sustainable food system. When one looks at the preambles it says it is working towards sustainable development goals, it is working towards feeding the European population with cheap food, and it is working towards environmental goals. In reality, however, they are impossible goals and objectives to achieve all together. One then gets very much stuck in a situation where, if one has impossible goals or objectives set within a quite rigid structure, one ends up at each policy cycle with a little tweak and sticking to business as usual or at least to inaction.

This is one of the issues we have and we have seen it with our own examples of food harvest. We will still drive on with production but we will keep an eye on it to make sure we do not harm the environment too much. Food Wise was about keeping a bit more of an eye on the environment and being a bit more wise about it, but still reaching all of our production targets. But we did not reach any of our environment targets. Now in our food strategy we are thinking that now we must start hitting our environmental targets, but we see already - 12 months after the agrifood strategy has been published - that it is out of line with the targets Ireland needs to meet on the environment, and the climate change targets in particular. I am not answering the Deputy's question very well, but we must understand-----