Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not disagree with a lot of what Deputy Wallace said. Agriculture does not have a free pass when it comes to climate change responsibilities. If we look at the performance of agriculture, we can see than since 1990, emissions from the agriculture sector in Ireland are down 10% while emissions from the transport sector are up 120%, so agriculture is on the right trajectory. Our dairy system, which is the fastest growing sector in Irish agriculture, is producing milk at the lowest emissions intensity on the planet along with Austria and New Zealand.

The point I am making is that we need to get better at doing that in agriculture. We need to reduce the emissions intensity. We are the only country in the world to measure emissions intensity at a farm level. We are measuring the carbon footprint of the herds on 46,000 beef farms - the emissions coming from those herds. Every dairy farmer in the country - all 17,000 of them - has signed up to a dairy sustainability programme which will involve a sustainability audit system on farm in those dairy farms to understand emissions, feed conversion efficiency, efficiency of the herd generally, animal health, protection of biodiversity and all the other measurements and benchmarks around sustainability. This is the way it should be. We need to keep pushing and encouraging farmers to do more around sustainability. We are spending €4 billion in the rural development programme. Some 70% of that money is focused on sustainability, on a GLAS or a beef genomics scheme, and on more efficiency and on ensuring we produce more efficiently at reduced emissions.

When I come across as being a bit defensive about our sector, it is not because I do not believe in the awesome challenge of climate change and the need for agriculture to respond to that. I give an honest answer when I say there is abatement potential in agriculture, and we can reduce the emissions coming from agriculture and increase output, but that other sectors, like transport, also have dramatic abatement potential in terms of reducing emissions in a way that agriculture probably does not have.

See this speech in context