Unique Irish foods which have helped create a vibrant "restaurant culture" are threatened by genetically modified foods, "the patent medicine of multinationals", according to food writer John McKenna.
If the Republic wanted to go down the route of allowing the widespread introduction of GM foods and growth of GM crops, it could not look forward to having six million visitors a year in 10 years, as had been predicted. For then there would be no difference between Wicklow and Connemara lamb: uniqueness would have given way to blandness.
It was unique flavours and places which built a "restaurant culture" in Ireland over the past decade, said The Irish Times's food writer. "Nobody can be a great cook with bad ingredients. If cooks had all the same ingredients, you would not come to west Cork because you would not get west Cork flavours." GM foods were "lowest common denominator foods". They had no sense of origin, location, passion or of the person who made them. They could not be "quality foods" when people were not being given genuine choice.
Bord Bia was promoting the ideal of "Ireland - the food island", he told the conference, but there was not much poetry in "Ireland - the genetically-modified food island".
Greater production of organic food was the way forward as it was not adulterated; especially as there was already too much adulteration of food and the environment. "To alter the nature of our foods to suit a multinational is the ultimate in adulteration."
Why the Ministers for Agriculture and the Environment were so "dead against GM foods" before the last election and now seemed so prepared to facilitate food biotechnology "is the biggest political mystery of recent times".
He said the chief reason was because agriculture was in a tailspin, intellectually moribund with no idea of where it was going and no idea of its past. "There's a sense of desperation in farmers at present, a sense of farming on its death bed, and what we are getting in its place is agribusiness."
This transition was not inevitable. A radical policy was required: "a green agriculture for a green Ireland". The skills and climate necessary for this were there to be utilised "rather than selling out to short-term, multinational interests" who were pushing "the bland pill of GM foods".