Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this important debate and I thank my colleague, Deputy Ó Cuív, for giving his time to debate this issue. I listened with interest to some of the contributions from backbenchers on the other side of the House. They sought to give us a history lesson on Fianna Fáil’s performance in the Department of Agriculture and Food over the past decade and before. It is a pity to stoop to that level in an important debate like this because it gives a lie to the recognition that there is a very significant crisis in the agriculture sector. While it might appear like point-scoring, or answering the question, as one would in a college debate, it falls well short of what the farming community expects from all of us here. Deputy Ó Cuív’s balanced motion with a solution attached deserves due recognition and considered debate from all sides. I hope and expect that the Minister will engage constructively.

I do not want to go back over agriculture issues but the previous Minister, Deputy Brendan Smith, set a very ambitious target for the production output of the agricultural sector, Harvest 2020. The target required successive governments to continue his efforts to ensure we reach that output. It is not just a question of output because to have an output it is necessary to have a sector that can get a fair day’s pay for a fair level of work. That is not happening in the beef sector; it has not happened for some time and now it has reached crisis level. I do not want to be over negative but the farming community does not believe the Minister is addressing this adequately, appropriately or in a manner that will help it to make an honest living.

Farmers are taking €3.60 per kilo for beef here while farmers for corresponding R grade beef steers in the UK will get €4.60 a kilo. On a standard carcass of 350 kilos, that amounts to a price differential of €350. By anyone’s analysis, that is a phenomenal differential and is not acceptable when the retailers charge effectively the same price on the shelf for Irish and British beef. Half of all our beef output is sold in the UK which it makes clear that this could have a detrimental impact on this sector, which this and the previous Government pinned so much on to improve employment prospects and generate increased growth in our fragile economy. The view is that in recent months the gap has widened and the price taken by UK farmers has gone up approximately 30 cent, another €100 per head. That is not sustainable.

There is no transparency. We need a beef regulator to deal with this area. Others have other ideas, and there is an expectation that the Minister could do more. I have heard his comments and share some of his concerns about his inability to get directly involved in what is effectively an unregulated sector that is regulated by the markets. There are other issues, such as the processing sector seeking to change the specifications at the same time as the supermarkets and McDonalds, a big user of beef, say they have not changed their specification. They do not expect anything different. The Minister and I know well that the attempt to change the specification is because the industry sees an oversupply of stock, resulting from the lack of export of Friesian bulls from the dairy herd in 2012. That has depressed the market because of the oversupply. I have not heard anything from the Minister or the Department about developing a strategy to deal with the increased production of the bull calves in 2015 when the dairy quotas end. That has the potential to further damage the market in 2016 and beyond.

See this speech in context