John Gibbons

speaker

1,007 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard yesterday

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

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

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.

So if we assume there's about two million households in Ireland, we're looking at a an annual fund of about fifty million euros.

Uh and the idea with this, interestingly, they say that this means no net additional cost to the average household.

Now, I'm not quite sure how a how you get a twenty-four euro levy that doesn't have additional costs, because of course we already

have insurance levies for I think for bailing out the likes of Quinn insurance and so on that are that we're all us insurance payers are already paying.

So how this one can be can not increase our insurance uh while being added to it, I'm not quite sure.

I suppose some of the interesting things in it, they're they're suggesting that we need to establish, and I would have to agree with them on this, a dedicated flood agency to oversee a framework of flood risk assessment and so on.

Showing 581–600 of 1,007 · page 30 of 51