Andrew Muir

And so they come to you when you get on and build stuff and that gives you some power as well.

And Andrew Muir, who's the Minister for Agriculture in Northern Ireland, asked if he could come and launch his new new food strategy from our shop, we were like, I don't know, let us see it first.

You know, like we have to approve it.

It needs to be aligned with what we're doing because we can say, no, you didn't give us anything to get here.

But according to said study, only 2.5% of farm waste is sent to AD plants.

DEFRA Minister Andrew Muir said that harnessing this feedstock for energy and biofertiliser could support the country's long-term sustainability ambitions for its £7.3 billion agri-food industry.

And finally, Nature's international conference, COP17, being held in Armenia is drawing to a close later this week.

The 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity opened in Yerevan on the 19th October.

And do you know what people in Ballymena say to me? How on earth did we have four unionist quotas and we only returned three unionist MLAs? That was the difference of another unionist being elected into the executive.

That's why we have Andrew Muir as our Agriculture Minister, who you voted a vote of no confidence in in the Assembly, because unionist division cost us seats.

And so...

Is he going to advocate that he should? But that's good to know.

Well,

that's, I mean, let me just say, Andrew Muir, who I interviewed, he's one of the gay alliance MLA's, great fellow, very, really lovely, likeable fellow, very committed fellow.

And I interviewed him for one of my feature interviews for the Sunday Independent, you know, when Joe met.

And he said last week, he talked about the extraordinary death threats, homophobic abuse that he faces from a particular quarter.

Terms apply.

Andrew Muir is unlike any agriculture minister in the history of Northern Ireland.

The Alliance Minister is also responsible for the environment and he believes the environment has been trashed in order to push factory farms which churn out cheap meat but leave behind vast volumes of slurry.

The Ulster Farmers Union, a powerful lobby group for agriculture, doesn't like Muir.

And, extraordinarily, he's been assaulted and had death threats.

I'm Sam McBride, the Belfast Telegraph's Northern Ireland editor.

Two weeks ago, I sat down with Andrew Muir in his Stormont office to talk about how farming in Northern Ireland has radically changed in ways many people don't realise, what that means for the environment and whether he is actually achieving what he wants to do or is inadvertently helping to fuel the move to more industrialised forms of farming.

Andrew Muir, thank you very much for speaking to The Bell Tell.

We'll be looking at her appearance, and we'll be talking about did we learn anything? Has anything moved on from what we talked about last week? Then Alliance walked out of the chamber this week.

You may have missed it, but they walked out of the chamber over a vote of no confidence in their minister for agriculture, environment, and rural affairs, Andrew Muir.

We'll be asking did it work or was it maybe just a more of a silly stunt? Then the A5 has got through its latest, uh, court judgment, so we're gonna be talking about that.

That's a bit of a victory for the executive.

Yeah

...

I mean, we've, we've talked about this before when it was Paul Given, and we'll talk about Andrew Muir in a second.

The votes of no confidence in the Northern Ireland system are not, uh, [laughs] unless Sinn Féin turn on Michelle O'Neill, which they're not going to do, um-