Ethical, food safety and bio-diversity concerns surrounding GM foods are the issues set to dominate when the national consultation debate on GM foods concludes next week.
The consumers' right to "proper choice" in having a real option not to eat GM foods has also been noted by a four-person independent chairing panel.
The outcome of the process is expected to have a significant bearing on a new national policy on genetically-modified organisms released into the environment to be finalised before EU regulations are revised this summer.
The chairman of the panel, Mr Turlough O'Donnell QC, said last night its members would attempt to put priorities on the many issues raised before the debate concludes on June 3rd.
Most issues centred on the science, "and the ethical basis of the science", the economic sustainability of GM foods, risk assessment, communications and the need for independent advisory structures and consumer choice.
Earlier, a professor of biology told the meeting that emotive language surrounding genetically-modified foods was used only to "scare the public".
It was meaningless to use terms such as "gene foods", said Prof Peter Whittaker of NUI Maynooth, because all foods contained genes, either from plants or animals. There were those who pursued an "unscrupulous exploitation" of the public's lack of understanding of the genetic technologies, he said.
This raised the issue of the "ethics of misinformation", whether it was ethical to mislead people to advance a position held in the arguments over safety. He was part of an EU advisory group looking at the ethics of biotechnology, he said, and as such was in a position to consider such ethical issues.
Speaking in favour of the application of biotechnology, Prof Whittaker said that genetic modification had been going on not for years or decades but for millennia, from the time humans began to plant crops and cross-breed to improve crop varieties. In more recent years radiation and chemicals had been used to induce mutations to develop new plant strains and now recombinant DNA technology was being applied to improve crops.
The genetic technologies had the potential to improve yields, reduce use of pesticides and herbicides and to improve the nutritional content of foods. "The list is endless. We have much to gain if we embrace it," he said, adding that failure to do so would mean Ireland could only consume the products produced elsewhere. The application of the technology was conducted under an EU directive and was not carried out in a haphazard fashion, Prof Fergal O'Gara, of University College, Cork, stated.
It defined what needed to be known about a modified organism and how its release should proceed.
The directive was introduced in 1990, he said and since then there had been nine years of experience with GM technologies.