Ireland had largely escaped the worst of this 'counter-factual' debating up to now, but there are indications that the virus has jumped the Atlantic and is now infecting our own institutions. This to me was chillingly illustrated when watching a recent Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture hearing, where scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were testifying around nitrates and water quality.

The chair, dairy farmer Jackie Cahill TD made it clear that he fundamentally rejected the scientific evidence on water quality presented by the EPA. Why? The meticulously gathered and collated EPA evidence, drawn from constant sampling almost 3,000 Irish water bodies, came under sustained attack not just from Cahill, but from right across the committee.

Senator Victor Boyhan claimed the EPA report “is not scientific and its integrity is questionable”, a baseless slur on the integrity of the researchers who contributed to it. The EPA scientists were then harangued by other committee members with intensely hostile questioning. Fine Gael TD Michael Ring for instance described the EPA as “a necessary evil”.

Though at times looking shell-shocked, the EPA scientists, led by Dr Eimear Cotter, held up admirably and stuck to the facts despite the simmering enmity.

This hostile atmosphere evaporated in the afternoon session, when the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) reps were treated as honoured guests by the same committee, with their statements going largely unchallenged.

To underline the difference in how they were treated, Cahill stated: “it was clear that in spite of significant increases in dairy cow numbers since 2015, water quality has not disimproved”. He wisely waited until the EPA scientists had left the committee room before delivering that demonstrably false assessment.

The line of questioning of the EPA by most of the committee members repeatedly used the same industry talking points. A new pattern of direct attacks on science by farm groups is fast emerging. In February, an EPA Land Use Review document was described by the IFA as “fundamentally flawed”, with its president, Tim Cullinan threatening an “uprising in rural Ireland”. 

Roscommon TD Michael Fitzmaurice claimed the EPA report amounted to “ethnic cleansing of the agriculture community”. The deployment of this kind of inflammatory language by the agri-sector and their political confreres is become ever more egregious. Earlier this year, Fianna Fáil TD Barry Cowen claimed EU nature restoration proposals “smack of cultural imperialism”.

Eddie Punch of the Irish Sheep and Cattle Association said he was “sick of listening to hippie dippies and tree huggers telling us we need to do more for the environment”.

Dermot Kelleher, president of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers Association said that “a small cabal of unrepresentative but noisy activists were salivating at the prospect of ripping out the heart of economic activity in Ireland”.

Pat McCormack, president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association in June said: “Everyone can see that at this stage it’s not about the data or the science: it’s actually about the ideology and the Government’s need to keep in harness viciously anti-farming elements”.

Apart from flatly rejecting the EPA's science around water pollution, McCormack also dismissed the role of agriculture in biodiversity loss, instead making the ludicrous assertion that motorway building and invasive minks were the real issue.

Pádraic Fogarty

Ecologist Pádraic Fogarty, campaigns officer with the Irish Wildlife Trust (IWT) has studied and reported on the drastic declines in Irish biodiversity for many years, and has been an outspoken and articulate critic of agricultural intensification and the negative impacts it has had on our already depleted ecosystems.

Fogarty is an expert in this area. Almost two weeks ago, he posted a blog on the IWT website accusing farmer representative groups of “increasingly lurching to the far right”, comparing their obstructionism and negativity to that deployed by the DUP.

The IFA took umbrage, even though Fogarty’s language was more measured than much of the frenzied mud-slinging from the agri side, and demanded its removal. Yielding to intense pressure, the board of the IWT amended the blog, but without consulting Fogarty, who then resigned, accusing the trust of “a capitulation to the IFA”.

In 2021, Oireachtas Agriculture committee chair, Jackie Cahill accused An Taisce, Ireland’s national trust, of “a revolting act of treason” for opposing a cheese plant. Where were the calls for his resignation for peddling such an outrageous slander?

Agriculture appears to be a genuine blind spot for the Irish media. Were this level of rhetoric coming from, say the motor trade or construction industry, it would be rightly condemned and the agitators publicly denounced.

This drift in discourse has not gone unnoticed. In Dublin last year, senior EU Commission official, Aurel Ciobanu-Dordea expressed the Commission’s alarm at the “increasingly aggressive stance” being taken against environmental defenders. This was, he added, “highly unusual to witness in an advanced society like Ireland”. The reaction to his comments? Silence.

This is how societies fail. Nobody spoke up against years of vicious attacks on environmentalists, so this emboldened agri-industrial activists to ratchet up the rhetoric and now target scientists and even smear the scientific process itself. Seriously, it’s time to shout ‘stop’.

• John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and commentator