Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Dolan and his colleagues and I thank him for the detailed presentation. It is great to have an all-Ireland body here that is doing good work in a quiet manner. The genius of the Good Friday Agreement was bringing people together to work together in new areas where such co-operation on all-Ireland basis would not have been envisaged. Such co-operation is also taking place on an east-west basis and further afield with the other 26 members of the European Union, apart from Britain and Ireland.

Mr. Dolan outlined very clearly the practical difficulties that will emerge for an organisation like safefood. He outlined that it is a small organisation but it carries out very important work. When I served as Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food I was very familiar with safefood's work and it is so important to get the message across. I like the phraseology Mr. Dolan used about the open Border and the fact that people work on an all-Ireland basis. That natural evolution of the work emerged without people shouting political slogans or waving flags of any sort. It was down to actions being carried out on a practical basis to contribute to a better society and a better Ireland in an all-Ireland context, which is the really heartening thing that has happened with all of these bodies. It has happened in the private sector as well where the Good Friday Agreement gave us the environment for businesses to be established on an all-Ireland basis. If we take the area of food, which is safefood's speciality, we have so many food industries today that were exclusively North or South in the past and thankfully today a huge number of them are all-Ireland businesses.

I hope I would be right in differing with Mr. Dolan on the hierarchy of standards in Britain. I have two contradictory views on that. I do not think the British consumer will allow a dumbing down of standards in food production. Britain exports substantial amounts of food too, so I would hope that they will not want to lose the markets that they have because of the high regulatory standards that they work to today as well as we do. We know to our cost that over many decades Britain had a cheap food policy that killed our farming sector for many decades. I sincerely hope that they do not go back to that but I presume that is where Mr. Dolan is coming from. It is not that they would deliberately try to implement a cheap food policy because I will not suggest that about any government or country, but imports from other countries where the standards are much lower than ours have to be a worry and there is no doubt about that. We have often heard people talking about climate change, environmental protection and all of that, and at the same time those people were advocating that we reduce the production of food in Ireland and western Europe, with that food production being replaced by food produced in less environmentally friendly and less sustainable systems such as South America, with all of the attendant environmental damage that would cause. That difficulty is there if food comes into Britain and comes over the Border then, but I sincerely hope that the British Government, its agencies and people would not agree to a dumbing down in food standards.

The message that Mr. Dolan gives out today is important for the great co-operation that happens every day without anybody talking about any political ideology from any tradition. I welcome the engagement and I complement the Cathaoirleach and the support staff on arranging for him to make this presentation. The public at large are not made aware often enough of what has flowed from the Good Friday Agreement and the practical work that is going on daily basis, being carried out by Mr. Dolan and his colleagues and safefood's sister organisations as well. I know that is in a structured way from the organisation that evolved from the Good Friday Agreement but it is happening in many other ways as well in the private sector and other public agencies. safefood might come back on the hierarchy of standards. I sincerely hope that my gut instinct that they will not go for a dumbing down of standards in Britain is right because they will not be buying our food products if they do.