Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Burger Content Investigations: Discussion

4:40 pm

Photo of Simon CoveneySimon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will answer Senator O'Neill's questions first. With regard to whether we will be looking for co-operation from the Polish authorities if there is a police investigation that spans a number of different countries, to be honest, it is too early to give an answer to that. What I hope will happen is that either we will send a team to Poland to talk through all of our findings, or they will send a team here. I would like to have more interaction with the Polish authorities in regard to the investigations and testing they are carrying out following what has happened. We would like to work in partnership to get to the bottom of this. In the absence of that, for the moment, we are continuing to keep connections open with the Polish authorities on a daily basis but we are also proactively going after this investigation to try to establish the facts. For all the reasons members have outlined today, we do not want this issue to drag on a day longer than it needs to.

With regard to Silvercrest, although I am not sure if Senator Mooney was present, I said earlier that I had been working with the broader industry and with the companies that were supplied with product from Silvercrest, particularly the larger ones, to try to ensure we can keep that business in Ireland. I do not want to give any more detail on that because there are some sensitive discussions going on at the moment which I do not want to damage. We are trying to make progress on that and I assure the Senator that the staff at Silvercrest are very much part of our plans in terms of trying to find an answer that can allow that plant to stay open and producing from what is probably the best piece of infrastructure of its type in Europe and arguably in the world. We are working on that. As soon as I can be more open about it, I will happily say that. I am confident we will find a solution but I do not want to over-promise and not deliver. None the less, it would be wrong to say we are not doing anything. In fact, we are doing a lot.

With regard to pressure from the multiples, there is an idea that the buying power and tight margins of the retail multiples, which are driving down prices, have somehow caused this. That is no excuse for what has happened here. Whether one is producing a very cheap product or a fillet steak, the same food safety standards should apply and the same traceability standards should apply if it is appropriate for that product. We have regulations in this regard. What is happening here is that different products are being produced with different ingredients at different values. For example, burgers that are being made for Burger King are actually very high-end product and cost significantly more to produce, and, as a result, the producer is paid significantly more for them. Companies such as Burger King want to source beef in Ireland because of the quality of our beef and the guarantees around it in terms of sustainability and all the other things we have built up in our sector. There is also a market for low-cost burgers. There are people who go to supermarkets who cannot afford to buy the high-end products. There is no food safety risk in buying cheaper product. Yes, it is lower value meat, and it is probably a bit tougher and contains off-cuts and trimmings, but it is perfectly safe. People are in the market for that because it is all they can afford to buy or it is all they want to spend on that type of product. It is these low-cost frozen burgers which are under the microscope here.

It is important to repeat the point that this is not an issue of investigation across the broader beef industry in Ireland. This is a specific product - frozen beefburgers that are cheaply produced and sold for very low margins at high volume-----

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