Ireland’s mad plan: kill cows to save the planet

You have to hand it to the green movement. When it comes to their increasingly farcical and delusional race towards the illusory target of net zero, they’re never short of ideas. Bad ideas, that is.

E-bikes and e-scooters that have an unfortunate tendency to explode in the middle of the night. Electric cars which take days to charge — when you can find a charger. Motorists threatened with eye-watering fines if they dare to go faster than twenty miles an hour. Honestly, don’t be surprised if the next generation of cars come equipped with only two gears and a built in speed inhibitor.

But here in Ireland, we have really taken the lead in coming up with Very Bad Ideas. In fact, the latest might be daftest yet.

The government wants to kill our cattle.

In what would normally be dismissed as little more than the frenzied imagination of a cranky conspiracy theorist who thinks the government really is out to get them, the Irish department of agriculture has come up with a plan to spend €600 million ($653 million) over the next three years, killing 200,000 dairy cattle.

What grave threat could possibly be posed by Daisy the dairy cow? Well, it’s all down to her methane. Yes, cow farts are apparently killing the planet.

Ireland’s Environmental Protective Agency claims that the agriculture sector accounted for 38 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 and, as they strive to reduce all agricultural emissions by 25 percent by 2030, that means the cows have to go.

While addressing the Environment and Climate Committee last March, Minister for Agriculture and food, Charlie McConalogue, admitted that one of the bright ideas conjured up by the Dairy Food Division Group was to “explore a voluntary dairy reduction scheme as part of its Climate Action Plan for 2023.”

To which every beef and dairy farmer in Ireland promptly replied: “Hell, no.”

While our political elites and those who swim around in the civil service, the media and academia don’t like to admit it, Ireland is still a predominantly agrarian society. Many elements of the Irish media like to present the country as a vast tech-hub, home to giant data centres and where all the major social media companies have established their European headquarters. That is undoubtedly true, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

Before you even add beef into the equation, the dairy industry is worth at least €13 billion ($14 billion) to the Irish economy, with 54,000 employed within its ranks. There’s a reason Irish butter brand Dairy Gold is so prized in the American market, and why we export dairy products to more than 100 other countries. Our climate and the quality of the grass makes for happy cows and happy cows make good meat and dairy.

You know you’re living in strange times when cows become a front line of the culture war but several recent marches by eco-zealots have seen young protesters holding placards proclaiming that anyone who eats meat or drinks milk obviously hates Mother Earth and probably wants to strangle a polar bear.

As one genuinely upset and bemused farmer told RTE News: “We’re being made out as if we’re killing the planet.”

There is certainly an element of the age old urban-countryside divide at play here, or as we call it in Ireland, jackeens versus culchies. The younger metropolitan protesters have never been to a farm in their life and hold the farmers in contempt, while the farmers just want to be left to alone to do their job.

But there is another element to this strange and ridiculous proposal which the green movement fails to have taken into account — the long-term ramifications.

This cull would be a disaster for agriculture sector, a disaster for the economy and a disaster for national morale. Why on earth should the taxpayer be expected to pay €600 million to kill our national herd?

First, they came for the dairy cattle, next they’ll be going after the beef herds. That leads us to one of the great contradictions inherent in the green movement: even if the powers that be massively reduce the beef herd, they won’t massively reduce the appetite for beef.

That means that stores will start importing cheap and inadequate beef from Brazil instead. Yes, the same Brazil that has been cutting down swathes of the Amazon to make way for pasture land for their own beef herds which they then export to countries like Ireland.

Can anyone who proposes culling our national herd honestly explain how it would be better for the planet if someone living in Dublin gets their Sunday roast flown all the way from Brazil rather than sourced from a local farm in County Meath, which is only a ninety-minute car journey up the road?

It’s as if some form of collective madness, a strange miasma, has descended on our politicians and other advocates of this plan. It’s a madness which ignores reality and replaces it with a quasi-religious hunt for that Holy Grail of the eco-movement: net zero.

It’s also a contagious madness — the Dutch government and other EU countries are keeping a close eye on how things develop here.

The elites in this country don’t care if this move tanks the economy and leaves tens of thousands jobless. After all, they have their secure jobs and index linked pensions to look forward to. And they will still be able to engage in their most cherished pastime — boasting to other European countries about how Ireland “is leading the way.”

Let’s see how smug they are, though, when 50,000 extremely irate and recently impoverished Irish farmers descend on the Dail to make their displeasure known.

Honestly, you could sell tickets for that one.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.