The explosive draft report on land use and carbon emissions compiled for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has certainly provoked a noisy reaction from rural TDs and the farm organisations.

The radical document claims that 90% of drained peatlands will have to be rewet and more than 35,000ha of forestry planted each year for Irish agriculture to be carbon neutral by 2050. And that’s on top of a 30% cut in cattle numbers.

The report prompted a furious riposte from rural politicians, with Roscommon TD Michael Fitzmaurice warning that its findings would amount to the “ethnic cleansing” of the west if implemented. There was even a twist on Cromwell’s infamous threat of ‘To Hell or to Connacht’, with one prominent farmer representative claiming that the EPA report could have been titled ‘To Hell With Connacht’, given the implications of its findings for the region.

Doubling down on the Biblical allusions, the same man described a recent estimation of emissions related to land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) as the ‘Lucifer Report’.

Worryingly, however, the devil for farmers is not only in the detail of these reports but also in the headlines – and that is not good for agriculture.