John Gibbons

speaker

1,007 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3d ago

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 — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Last Word with Matt Cooper · Should Farmers Get Funding To Help The Environment? · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

Chagas is essentially a livestock research organisation.

That's all they're interested in because, guess what, that's their mandate, as they see it, is to simply push one model.

What we should, of course, have instead of Chagas is we should have an agricultural research agency that is sending their best people off to look to Denmark, to Holland, all around the world, to look at the best models that are most suitable for our changing climate.

Yeah, my modest proposal here for Ireland is that we replace the Department of Agriculture and Chagas with the Department of National Food Security.

Because let's kind of get right back to brass tacks.

The reason, for example, that vast amounts of money is transferred, and rightly so, from the European Union into the agriculture sector through the CAP, is food security.

After the Second World War, the big issue in Europe was starvation and hunger.

So we've been...

incredibly successful in securing our food supplies within Europe.

But in many respects, we've been too successful.

And we now come out the other side and we've got to come up with a model that is sustainable, that allows food production to match the needs of the population and is also environmentally friendly.

So what we have instead are industrialized food processes like we've seen in Denmark, like we see here in Ireland, that are incredibly

Not delivering food security.

So in the case of Ireland, Matt, we are unbelievably exposed to any kind of a major downturn.

For example, interruption to our sea lanes, which would lead to not just our supermarket shelves emptying, but also food shortages for our animals.

Because they too are dependent on imported feeds and imported chemical fertilisers.

A million tonnes a year to make that green grass grow.

Well, for example, I'm just back from Holland where I looked at some of these things and they have a horticulture sector that produces about 38 billion euros a year and

They do it on a fraction of the land used by livestock here in Ireland.

Their horticulture sector alone, Matt, employs more people full-time and part-time than the entire Irish agriculture industry.

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