The Government’s National Mitigation Plan to lessen the impact of climate change has resulted in plenty of hot air on all sides of the table.

But a few facts are crystal clear: (1) Ireland has a binding agreement with the European Union to reduce our emissions over the coming decade; (2) Irish agriculture continues to increase its output and therefore is accelerating the country’s emissions; (3) We won’t be within an ass’s roar of meeting the targets we agreed to; (4) Ireland is in line for massive EU fines.

Stick your head in the sand if you like, but something will have to give.

Let’s look at two of the factions who are easy to portray and stereotype: farmers and environmentalists.

We won’t mention the fact that some farmers are also environmentalists and vice versa, since that just confuses people, especially those in the media.

Efficiency

Farmers shout that if food wasn’t produced efficiently here, it’d be produced someplace else in a less efficient manner.

Environmentalists shout back that farmers are poisoning the land with more and more chemical fertiliser to increase output.

Neither side ever seems to put forward much evidence to back up their claims.

Other players behind the curtain

All the while, several other players try to make themselves invisible, as if they had no role in the drama. Where are the politicians?

The mitigation plan and accompanying press release are published, the usual round of soft interviews are done and then they duck for cover again.

What about the agri-processors and the retailers? These groups are as much part of the agriculture industry as farmers, but they keep their heads down when climate change is mentioned.

Then there’s the climate scientists and agriculture economists: where are their joint solutions?

Nobody wants to get stuck into fixing the issue and the media make things worse by scapegoating greedy farmers and hippy environmentalists.

The most important group of people in all this are the citizens of Ireland: you and me. The Government won’t face down farmers and decrease agriculture exports.

Neither will they offer alternative schemes to allow farmers maintain a livelihood if they did actually reduce their output.

Banking crisis

Most worrying is that there are parallels here with the 2008 banking crisis and the appalling cutbacks endured by Irish people to pay for the mistakes of bankers and the inaction of Government.

Back then, the Government took the easy option of simply accepting the invoice from Europe and passing it on to us.

If something doesn’t give in the supposed fight between farmers and environmentalists, I can see the Government again just accepting the fines for missing climate targets and passing them on to the citizens.

And their highly paid PR personnel will convince the public that it’s all farmers’ fault.

Kieran Sullivan and his brother farm part-time in Co Waterford. You can follow him on Twitter: @kieran_sullivan

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