Mr. John Keane:

In the interests of fairness, Dr. Hanrahan wanted to respond to a couple of points raised by Deputy Ring before the break. I have a couple of points that will not take very long.

On Deputy Danny Healy-Rae's question on numbers, there is no concrete figure to say farmers will have to cut their stock by four or ten head of cattle, because the science is not there to tell us what each farmer will have to do individually. KPMG commissioned a report last year, about which the Taoiseach made comments, that estimated a 25% reduction means approximately 400,000 head of cattle would have to be culled to meet that target. The Food Vision dairy group report recommends, as part of an exit scheme, a reduction of 100,000 cows would remove 450,000 tonnes of carbon emissions from the sector. There is a multiplier effect from this. Every dairy cow has about 1.9 equivalent livestock units on a farm, therefore, it would mean 300,000 animals for that sector alone. There is also a recommendation for a reduction in the beef sector, figures for which have yet to be finalised.

As for what credit farmers may get for sequestration, we have no measurement or benchmark for that either. Research is ongoing on the towers in signpost farms to indicate what carbon is being stored, as well as what is being added. The results are promising but the figures are not available either. We regularly talk about emissions trading and creating emissions profiles for farmers - the latter are easily measured because it is on a per-head basis - but no resources are given towards investigating what sequestration is taking place inside every farmer's gate in the country. We should be getting credit for what is being sequestered and not just being penalised for emissions. We are aware the carbon farming proposal by the EU Commission is due to be published at the end of this month, which will give an overarching indication of what that might look like. We welcome what indications may be contained in that.

On fertiliser usage, reduction by another means is being proposed in that regard. It is ironic that we are proposing reductions in the total tonnage of fertiliser that may be used in the country, while at the same time we are talking about increasing the number of anaerobic digesters. Anyone who has taken the time to look at anaerobic digesters working on the Continent will say that maize, high-quality grass, whole crop and even grains are fed to anaerobic digesters. The last time I met a group of tillage, dairy or beef farmers who were involved in producing that type of quality produce, they had to spread nutrients in the form of fertilisers to grow the crop.