THE head of the UN's climate change agency, Yvo de Boer, has told a conference on global warming in Germany that "the best solution would be for us all to become vegetarians".

One would imagine that Ireland's green brigade would have leapt on the statement like a hungry lion on a wounded gazelle. They never stop nagging motorists and passengers jetting off to Corfu for their summer hols about their responsibilities to the planet, so surely they'd welcome another opportunity to make people feel guilty?

But no, they're keeping mightily quiet about the whole subject, perhaps hoping that, if they ignore it, it will just go away and they can get back to business as usual. That is, hectoring more car owners.

The last time that this particular question was raised, some members of the Green Party claimed sheepishly that the reason they don't make a louder case for vegetarianism was because they didn't want to be stereotyped by the voters as bushy-bearded tree- huggers, when they were striving to be taken seriously as a party of government.

Fair enough. But if they're so desperate to keep their knees under the ministerial table that they're willing to simply ignore evidence about the environmental effects of whole areas of human life, then why should they expect to be taken seriously as Greens at all?

Other politicians have certainly overcome this coyness. A million people in Taiwan -- out of a total population of 23 million -- have agreed a pledge to become vegetarians to help Taiwan meet its targets for reducing carbon emissions. Their number includes the country's environment minister and the mayors of the island's major cities.

Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the mice of the Green Party are still afraid to squeak up in favour of this option.

What's their excuse, now that the UN has made the connection so explicit?

The massive environmental damage wreaked by the meat industry is well documented. Over 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions comes from livestock -- that's more than every car, bus, plane, boat and train on the planet combined.

In Ireland, the figure is even bigger, at 27.7 per cent, the highest figure of any of the EU states. Methane produced by livestock is 20 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Any environmentalist who sternly lectures his fellow countrymen for catching a plane or driving to work, whilst himself eating meat, is therefore manifestly a hypocrite -- a fact which can never be tossed into their smug, self- righteous little faces often enough.

Every single pound of beef produced requires seven pounds of grain in feeding -- grain which could quite easily be eaten by humans instead.

It's actually been estimated that 800 million people annually could be fed with the grain which America alone gives to its livestock; and were every American to eat one meat-free meal a week -- just one -- it would be equivalent to taking half a millions cars off the road.

With a larger population than the US, the equivalent figures for the impact of our behaviour in Europe can't be far behind.

Wastefulness on this scale puts cars into the halfpenny place. If anything, it's cows which should be hit with a green tax, not transport.

But there's relentless propaganda against the automobile and aviation industry, which is now even being forcefed to children in the classroom as gospel truth.

Any parent with a child of schoolgoing age knows it's rare for a day to pass without the irritating blighters coming home and fingerwagging their long suffering parents about how teacher said they shouldn't drive to the shops or leave the TV on standby otherwise some cute polar bear cub in the Arctic will immediately drop down dead.

But whilst Greens are noisily in favour of punishing people for every last pleasure in their lives, and recently (on the website change.ie, launched by Environment Minister John Gormley in February to promote "low carbon living") urged Europe to "get tough with the aviation industry", there is not a single word about the effect of the meat industry on global warming. Not one. This was their pet project, to play with as lavishly and expensively as they wished, and even there they don't have the cojones to talk about meat.

On the section inviting respondents to calculate their own carbon footprint under the heading 'Know Your Number', it doesn't even ask whether you eat meat, despite the fact that switching to a vegetarian diet would immediately reduce everyone's carbon footprint by an estimated 1.5 tons a year.

Instead there's a lot of nonsense about how we should plant more trees to mop up the effects of all that methane from flatulent cattle, and some even sillier advice about not eating onions in the summer because they're not in season.

Very radical.

When I calculated my own footprint, I was even urged to take fewer train journeys. Presumably I should get off the Dart a few stops early and walk the rest of the way -- despite the fact that the thing is still going where it's going whether I'm on it or not?

Of course, any campaign to wean Irish people off their meat is doomed to failure. The anti-smoking Nazis are bad enough. If there were vegetable police patrolling the streets ensuring that you didn't exceed your permitted quota of cheeseburgers, there'd rightfully be an outcry.

But cars and planes are here to stay as well, and that doesn't stop Greens from brainwashing people into seeing anything with wheels or metal wings as the defining villains of the age.

Machines are like our version of sin eaters, who in days gone by attended the death beds of unreformed sinners and agreed, for a price, to take on the cosmic burden of their wrongdoings, only this time the unfairly maligned folks in the people-carriers are being landed with the sins of others whether they agree or not.

The TV ad which launched the Government's campaign on global warming said that "our response will define us as a generation".

If so, then the Greens have clearly failed the test already. They're all talk when it comes to ganging up on Ryanair, or George Bush and the oil men, or the fishermen crippled by rising fuel costs, but don't even have the courage to stand up to a little mockery from voters back home who might make a few jokes about lentil burgers if they gave them the facts about the environmental benefits of eating less meat.

The eco-warriors of Ireland are now in the position where Paul McCartney -- who has been out there preaching the environmental benefits of vegetarianism for years -- is more cutting edge politically than they are. And by any reckoning that has to be very, very wrong.

- Eilis O'Hanlon