Ireland, with less than 30,000ac of potatoes, has had an active and successful breeding programme for potatoes, as well as grass and clover, for many years.

The late Harry Keogh, based in Teagasc Oakpark, was a world-renowned figure in the sector and we saw world-beating varieties such as Rooster come out of the Carlow campus.

With 20 times the acreage under cereals as is under potatoes, there is now no reason why we should not have an Irish national cereal breeding programme.

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Minister Martin Heydon is right – the new agreement, which will allow the new genomic techniques (NGTs), has the capacity to transform disease resistance and productivity in Irish cereal growing.

We can go on banging our heads against a stone wall asking for greater protection against imports and a return to the old system of a high, guaranteed intervention price and export subsidies to get rid of any surplus production, but the world has moved on and with Europe’s new priorities including a likely acceleration in Ukraine’s EU membership, we must move forward based on what modern science can deliver as well as sensible policy adjustments.

It was always put forward that the reason Ireland did not have a cereal breeding programme was that the costs were too high for our scale.

I am not sure if that was ever a really valid excuse but it certainly isn’t now.

The new, precise breeding techniques that are about to be formally adopted will allow much more precise intervention and genetic adjustment.

Raw scale will not be the constraint in the future that it was in the past.

We have some outstanding expertise in this area in Oakpark as well as suitable land, coupled with significant testing facilities at the Department’s Backweston site, as well as the UCD farm at Lyons: not to mention the expertise and facilities within the specialist seed companies such as Goldcrop and Seedtech.

It’s not difficult to imagine an urgent agenda that could be addressed by an Irish-focussed cereal breeding policy: septoria in wheat, a greater number of BYDV-resistant barleys, as well as a concentration on new malting varieties suitable for Irish conditions.

Guinness and the Department of Agriculture used to have a barley breeding farm and programme at Ballinacurra in Cork.

These new developments at EU level should allow Ireland’s capacity to produce the highest yields in the world to be fully expressed rather than being smothered by chemical withdrawals and plant resistance as at present. Ironically, the same climatic and soil conditions that justified the derogation in Irish dairying are the very same conditions that would justify an Irish cereal breeding programme.

An informed forum should be assembled immediately and a national policy developed.