Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I greatly appreciate the fact that the witnesses came before us today. I thank them for the work they are doing. There is no doubt that we seem to extinguish one element of our natural environment every day through our actions as a people so we need to conserve our natural environment. The small farmer in this country is an endangered species to some extent, and many of the threats to them come not from the people in this room but from the market economy we are building in the European Union. If we hope to achieve the objectives the committee and the witnesses have laid out, we need to work in partnership in the future.