Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir:

The Deputy asked a very good question. Those extracts come from Volume 2. I must declare I am not an agricultural expert, but I and my co-authors were responsible for gathering the evidence in agriculture and indeed the other sectors. There are a number of reasons agriculture is where it is in terms of emissions, in an Irish context, and also why it has a lower target and is finding challenges. I will give a few of those.

An unusually high proportion of our emissions come from agriculture. It is not necessarily the case that we are doing anything much worse than others. We generate a lot of agricultural activity to export. About 90% of the beef and dairy product is exported, but the emissions occur here. In the same way, we import a lot of cars and the emissions associated with car manufacturing happen elsewhere. That gives one of the starting points for why our emissions would be higher than in many other parts of the world as a share of our overall emissions.

As for some of the challenges in agriculture, we have seen in recent times reductions in fertiliser usage. Part of that was driven by the availability of options like multi-species sward, clover and different things that can be introduced. There was also the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on fertiliser prices, making it a case of making do with less due to the high costs. Consequently, we have seen some progress there. We have seen less progress with methane emissions. There is a lot of research available on how to reduce the methane associated with the production in beef and dairy farming, but much of that research has not been adopted here yet. Some of it is because it is at an earlier stage than, say, the development of wind turbines or electric vehicles.

In addition, if we look at age and socioeconomic profile of farming families in Ireland there are challenges there with the adoption of significant change in a short space of time. Those challenges in part explain why the target would be less than in other sectors. We talk about the need to diversify and to include more diversification in discussions around agriculture. In some respects, the challenge in the agriculture sector is the emissions, not the farmers, and the question is whether there are possibilities for alternative livelihoods and schemes to support them. Those are areas that have not been developed much. We do not have much research on those. There is a sense of some system inertia, as in all sectors. To a certain extent, some of the voices speaking on behalf of the agricultural sector have not served their members well with respect to that question of inertia. This is a dynamic we see across other sectors. That gives a snapshot of what we found and called out in Volume 2. I hope it answers the Deputy's question.