Mr. James Gaffey:

I would like to comment on the bioeconomy and where we are at now in the business model and farmers being able to take these up on the farm. When Dr. McMahon and I first started looking at this, we were looking overseas at what people were doing in other countries around putting in infrastructure on the ground. We had to go over there to see this and then bring ideas back home. We are now at the stage where the Government is starting to invest in demonstration projects which are in a practical setting - for example, working with Carbery farmers and others to demonstrate these technologies, to test business models and markets and working with them to show how products can work. Some of the things we are doing in grass, for example, is producing protein and this is being tested as a replacement for soy bean meal. We import a lot of soy, for example, so this would be an Irish alternative. We are definitely making a lot of progress in a more scaled setting and the next stage will be to move it up to the commercial level. I do not think we are too far away. Some of the business models we have been looking at overseas, which would have been at the more demonstration scale we are at now are now moving to commercial level. There is definitely potential to do this in quite a short time frame.

On sustainability, impacting, out-scaling and so on, it is case-by-case. It depends on how we implement it. If we do things in an unsustainable way, we will have unsustainable results but I would say that with the Irish interpretation of the bioeconomy and what is coming from Europe in terms of its bioeconomy strategy, there is much more awareness on the need to implement these circular bioeconomy ideas in a way that is within the ecological boundaries so that we are taking into account and protecting against the adverse effects of scaling done by some of these solutions.

That can happen in various ways. It can happen, as was suggested, through increasing land production for feedstock and things like that. It can be caused by integrating solutions which are not really clean or green, or as a result of products that are not really resolving challenges. There are lots of ways in which this can happen but now, through the integration of the bioeconomy within the circular economy, there is much more awareness of the need to guard against those impacts.