John Gibbons

speaker

873 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Sep

John Gibbons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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The Last Word with Matt Cooper · Environment: Should We Stockpile Food To Prepare For National Emergencies? · 27 Aug 2026 podcast

You don't have fire of course you do.

You don't have fire insurance because you expect it to burn down.

You have it because you cannot afford the risk, however small, of that happening.

So this is really a a conservative risk approach, which we we're we're very short on in Ireland.

Well I'm glad they brought that up because of course, as you say, we have this uh agriculture system which has got v almost nothing to do with feeding the population of Ireland and everything to do with bulk exporting of commodities to distant markets.

So our food production system and our agriculture system is completely divorced from the needs of the Irish population, which is a bit shocking really.

Now what that means is that we're at the mercy of imports and and and I

I should say that those uh people who are who are making those remarks, um, in order to run our livestock agriculture system, we're importing about five million tons of animal feed and other million tons of um chemical fertilizer.

So in the event of the type of breakdown that I'm describing, you would basically have okay, in the short term you can certainly slaughter some of these animals and eat them, but in the long term, many of those animals will actually starve as well.

And it is no base.

Of course, for a food system, because obviously meat and dairy only provides a very small piece of our of our total food spectrum.

So what we're looking for here, Matt, is a balance, right?

We could have a thriving horticultural system in Ireland producing huge amounts of food for the Irish population without shutting down the livestock sector.

And the livestock people need to get off this one, right?

They want the entire country producing nothing but uh you know meat and dairy for

export and in so doing they're completely neglecting the needs of the Irish public.

And at some point the Irish public, by the way, who pay the piper to the tune of over two billion euros, will probably want better value for it.

That's right.

This is this has actually come at from the industry from Insurance Ireland.

And they're proposing a a levy of twenty-four euros per insured household.

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