A petition carrying the names of 7,500 people who are opposed to the live export of cattle will be handed into the Department of Agriculture and Food later today.
The petition has been organised by Compassion in World Farming in Ireland, which wants the live export trade ended and replaced by a trade in meat.
The protest is also intended to put pressure on the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, who is at the centre of negotiations in Brussels where new animal travel regulations are being decided.
So far this year 188,000 animals have been exported live from Ireland, most of them to continental Europe where the new travel regulations will apply.
The European Commission has proposed a limit on the duration of travel times for animals, but Ireland and four other EU countries are opposing the restrictions on the basis that they could mean an end of the trade from Ireland.
Ms Mary-Anne Bartlett, director of CWF in Ireland, said her organisation was critical of the proposed new EU rules because they did not include any total journey limit for animals. "Like the present rules, they simply lay down a cycle of travel and rest that can be repeated an indefinite number of times," she said.
She said CWF wanted the EU proposals to be amended to include a total journey limit of eight hours and that after eight hours, the animal must be at its final destination.
Farm organisations and live exporters have already opposed limits on journey times and have argued that even an 11-hour time limit would mean that no Irish animals could be shipped to the Continent, which is an 18-hour ferry journey away.