Dr. Tadhg O'Mahony:

Absolutely. The NESC report on just transition noted this, based on a Teagasc survey. About 45% to 50% of farms are economically vulnerable. That is a system that is not working on a livelihoods basis. We also know it is not working on a biodiversity basis so we need to prioritise livelihoods and biodiversity and see how we can put them together. That comes back to things like the strategic vision for the future of the country and how we are aligning and financing an investment in public subsidies towards achieving those goals. At the moment it prioritises maximising production for export markets where there are benefits for a small minority of actors. It does not favour the public good. It does not favour biodiversity and to be honest, it does not really favour the future of rural Ireland. We need a strategic approach to move away from that. We can strongly argue that that can be beneficial in multiple different directions but we have not looked at the alternatives enough. Recently some analyses have started to look at changing this but we do not understand the synergies between these goals enough. We do not understand the strategic approach for the long term and we do not understand, although NESC has done some very good work on this, bringing in a just transition for agriculture. We do not understand enough of the voices, the range of voices from rural Ireland and from farming households, and how they can inform what we need to do here and start to work towards those win-win outcomes that we know are there. They are strong in the literature so it is about using them strategically for policies and acting on that.