Where to start in discussing the Glanbia/An Taisce saga, which finally came to a conclusion this week as the Supreme Court found decisively against An Taisce’s case?

Perhaps the following excerpt from the written judgement handed down on Wednesday morning is as good a place as any: “Ireland has many advantages when it comes to milk production because, along with New Zealand, we have perhaps the most ideal climate for the grass-fed and largely outdoor, pasture-based dairy production which results in a bountiful supply of high-quality milk.

“To some extent, that production was artificially constrained by the introduction of the milk quota regime by the (then) European Economic Community in 1984. With the increased professionalism and productivity of farmers and the rise of indigenous agri-food multinationals, there were many reasons why Irish milk production was set to grow significantly following the ending of the milk quota regime in April 2015.”

It sounds like something written by Ornua, the Irish dairy board. And it is the backdrop to a complex saga, one that has dragged on since Glanbia obtained planning permission back in November 2019.

A few thoughts on the saga and its outcome.

Changed world

The world which Glanbia’s cheese plant and its planning permission emerges into in February 2022 is a very changed one to that of November 2019 for a number of reasons.

One obvious change is that the cost of building has risen significantly. The ‘€140m’ project could now well run north of €200m.

That is a cost that Glanbia Ireland, a co-operative owned by 13,000 Irish families with a farming footprint, will have to absorb.

But also, the atmosphere and mood music around the Irish dairy sector and further expansion has dramatically changed.

The sectoral targets applied under the Government’s climate action strategy effectively halt further dairy expansion unless there is a breakthrough in methane emissions from livestock or a collapse in the suckler herd.

The high-level taskforce set up under the auspices of Food Vision 2030 is expected to deliver some blueprint or plan for the dairy sector by the end of next month, and it’s hard to see expansion outside certain target groups in the medium term.

But that doesn’t mean this plant shouldn’t be built. For one of the unspoken truths of this whole saga was that the majority of the milk pool required already exists within Glanbia. Ireland’s largest dairy processor is exporting millions of litres of milk, perhaps as much as 200m litres of milk every year, to other dairy processors.

It simply doesn’t have the capacity to process all its own milk, despite the building of the existing Belview plant less than a decade ago.

Project still relevant

The nature of Irish dairy farming goes to the heart of why the project is occurring in the first place.

Remember, it’s a joint venture between Glanbia and Dutch company Royal A-ware to produce soft cheese for the EU market.

For Glanbia, this is expansion into a product that is the cheese of choice across Europe. Cheddar is mostly popular in Ireland and the UK, and post-Brexit, that leaves Glanbia and indeed the wider Irish dairy sector vulnerable.

An Taisce made great play of the fact that the Royal A-ware was coming to Ireland for a supply of milk because environmental awareness had forced a reduction in dairy output in the Netherlands, in contrast to Ireland’s recent dairy expansion.

It’s almost like Ireland is becoming the ‘bad bank’ for European dairy farming.

The reality is somewhat different. Dairy farming in the Netherlands is indoor, based on feed imports through giant ports like Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

They had more cows than us in a much smaller country.

It could be argued that Royal A-ware is coming here to secure a source of milk that is grass-based and thus more sustainable in the long term, both from a cost-base and an environmental footprint point of view.

Lack of definition not helping

In my younger days I did some debating. Whether in school, Macra or Junior Chamber, we were always told to define the terms under debate.

Properly framing the words we were advancing as a self-evident truth allowed the audience and the judges to understand the thrust of our argument. It also allowed the opposing team to challenge our assertions.

In terms of the “big debate” around farming, that is not happening.

Terms like “factory farming”, “industrial farming” and “intensive farming” are bandied about without any definition or context.

They are often interchanged as if they meant the same thing. And that is wrong.

There are many Irish farms that could properly be described as “intensive” but are neither “industrial” nor “factory” farms.

These terms have become pejorative - a form of insult or denigration.

I sat through a webinar hosted by An Taisce last year entitled “A conversation on intensive agriculture and the environment”.

There was no attempt to frame what was to be understood as “intensive agriculture” other than a couple of slide-rule comparisons between the south and east and the west/rest of the country.

There seems to be a touch of the “I know an industrial farm/intensive farm/factory farm/ when I see it” about this.

I didn’t even ask a question when the opportunity arose, because the points made later, many of them pertinent and well made, were essentially built on sand.

How the hell are we meant to have an honest conversation based on something that tenuous and subjective?