Agriculture minister stands by controversial Teagasc report on livestock systems

Thu, 30 Nov, 2023 - 19:00

Padraig Hoare and Cianan Brennan

Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue has said he fully stands by Teagasc after the research body was accused of engaging in "climate denial” over the so-called “Dublin Declaration”.

Asked by TD Paul Murphy at the Oireachtas climate committee on Thursday if he backed the Dublin Declaration — which Mr Murphy claimed is “effectively an exercise in climate denial” — Mr McConalogue said he stood by Teagasc.

“Anything Teagasc is involved in and put their name to, they look at it with very strong scientific rigour. I fully back the work they are doing,” the Agriculture Minister said.

Mr McConalogue said he disagreed the Dublin Declaration “was a climate denialist exercise” and that Teagasc’s work “is very robust”.

Last month, Teagasc said the contracts it holds with food businesses specifically preclude those companies from influencing the output of the body’s research activities.

It did so in the wake of a report in the Guardian last month claiming the Dublin Declaration, signed by more than 1,000 scientists and launched at a Teagasc-funded event at the Food Research Centre in Ashtown, West Dublin, in 2022, had numerous links to the livestock industry.

The declaration states livestock systems, the reduction of which is broadly considered by scientists to be key to battling climate change, “are too precious to society to become the victim of simplification, reductionism, or zealotry”.

Those claims have been strongly refuted by environmental scientists, who say the evidence is clear that high meat consumption should be curtailed to reduce high emissions from methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Meanwhile, the Oireachtas has declined to hold hearings into the role Teagasc played in the dissemination of the declaration, which has been used to lobby senior EU officials against environmental policies.

The Joint Committee on Agriculture has written to Green TD Neasa Hourigan to tell her it is proposing “no further action” in terms of Teagasc’s “input” to the declaration.

Ms Hourigan had written to both the Agriculture and Public Accounts Committees asking them to “interrogate” the fact that Teagasc, in majority-funding the October 2022 launch event’s €45,000 cost, had committed an allegedly “hugely serious breach of basic standards around conflict of interest and the use of taxpayers’ money to further the agenda of industry lobbyists”.

While the PAC recently elected to redirect Ms Hourigan’s request to the agriculture committee as it concerned a “policy issue” not “related to the accounts of Teagasc”, the latter has denied the request outright.

In response to that refusal, Ms Hourigan said the action “effectively results in no oversight or questioning on the outlay of public money or industry lobbyists’ role in that spending”.

She asked the agriculture committee to indicate in writing if it is of the opinion the money spent on the Dublin Declaration’s launch is “insufficient to warrant investigation” and that the committee has “full confidence in the corporate and ethical governance of Teagasc” and “rejects any claims” of “lobbyist links to the organisation”.

Teagasc, queried at the time as to the contents of the Guardian report, said when asked about the potential links between the declaration and the livestock industry that it “routinely hosts international scientific conferences to bring together the latest science available on a particular topic, and to facilitate discussion around the science”.

The agency did not directly respond to a query as to the scientific bona fides of the Dublin Declaration, but did acknowledge it receives “funding from food companies”, but that contracts are in place to ensure its output is not influenced by those relationships.

Teagasc rebuffs 'Guardian' claim and says food firms do not influence its research