Mr. Eddie Punch:

In response to Deputy Martin Kenny’s question about the fair share of the retail price, the ICSA proposed some time back that this needs to be solved at EU level. The entire food chain has to be regulated. Our proposal is to have a regulator at EU level who would have power to audit the accounts of the multinationals involved in the retail trade.

At the moment, no individual member state is able to pursue this - to follow the money, as it were. Companies such as Aldi, Lidl, Tesco and so on are involved in this country and other countries. With the best will in the world, it would be difficult to audit the margins they make and identify where the money goes. There needs to be auditing power at EU level to examine the accounts of these multinational corporations. There has been much talk about multinationals in recent weeks but there is no getting away from the fact that the source of almost all the farmer's income difficulties is that the more the farmer is dependent primarily on Brussels funding or national funding, the more he is being undermined by getting less and less of the retail price at the other end of the food chain. We have to begin with full understanding of who - the processor or the retailer - is making what. The situation where these corporations can work and keep consumers, farmers, policymakers and the EU in the dark about where the money is going is increasingly intolerable. The proper function of an entity like the EU must be to tackle the power of very large multinationals. There is no point in the EU solely regulating the activity of the little people, namely, small-scale businesses. There is, for example, a huge burden of bureaucracy on farmers.

Any number of State employees are, on behalf of the EU, auditing, measuring and examining what farmers are doing. There are satellites in the sky and so on. We need this effort to be refocused on what is happening in the food chain at the money end of the show.

Regarding European funding, there is clearly no getting away from the fact that the beef, sheep and cereal sectors are not the most profitable in Irish farming. It is baffling to us how there have been two rescue packages for dairy, notwithstanding the fact that the incomes of cattle and sheep farms in 2016 will still be at the bottom of the heap. The cereal farms will not be much better. It is incomprehensible that we would twice put a package in place to give cash to dairy farmers only. The likelihood is that the dairy markets will recover next year and revert to their traditional position of making three times per hectare what cattle and sheep farmers make. I do not want a row between farmers, but there is no getting away from this. We must reflect the fact that cattle and sheep farmers are the poor relations.

Regarding a computerised system in the Department, our point was that the targeted agricultural modernisation scheme, TAMS, was held up because a software system had to be put in place to deal with applications. Our understanding is that the Department has resolved this situation. We will watch carefully to ensure that payments are progressed as quickly as possible.

Like everyone else, we are concerned about the impact of Brexit on our sector. Beef prices have slipped in recent weeks. Live exports will be even more important now if we are to reduce our dependency on beef exports to the UK. We must use every opportunity to get the message across that Ireland's position is a special one. I spoke at an agrifood conference in France yesterday that was organised by Ouest-France. I got the opportunity to have a few words with Mr. Michel Barnier, the European Commission's Brexit negotiator and a former French Minister for agriculture. I put across the message that we needed a special and continuous engagement in the EU's negotiation with the UK. He outlined that he would be engaging with each member state's government, particularly ours. This avenue must be pursued very assiduously by our Government. There is an appreciation in Europe that we have a particular interest. In a nutshell, we do not want the trading arrangements between Europe and the UK, which really means our exports of beef to the UK, undermined in any way by the playing of a different political game in the talks.