Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 2:

In page 7, between lines 21 and 22, to insert the following:

“(4) Part 3 comes into operation on such day as the Minister may appoint by order, but not prior to reciprocal arrangements being in place to facilitate the operation of such a register on an all-island basis.”.

Deputy Browne and I submitted our amendment to recognise that the concerns raised with us by a number of stakeholders in respect of this aspect of the regulation are not being fully addressed. There will be a North-South dimension as a result of the operation of this order, particularly in respect of the Border region.

The Minister says in his opening statement that: "The only additional requirement will be that such transactions are imports and that farmers buying from the North, for example, will have to register as fertiliser economic operators and submit information on those imports to the national fertiliser database." That is a substantial additional requirement and will have a negative impact on all-Ireland trade. The provision is absolutely illogical. I have talked to many people in the sector and nobody disputed that the provision will create a loophole that will undermine the very basis of the legislation in that it will just take one or two bad operators in this State to purchase north of the Border and either maliciously or by mistake import or transfer unregistered fertiliser from the North into the South. I have asked at different points for the Minister to engage with his Department's counterpart in the North to address these concerns but I have not seen evidence of that as yet.

To my mind, we are in a position post Brexit where increasingly partitionist issues arise within the outworking. We have been dealing with farmers in my own constituency in respect of the lime scheme whereby the practitioners, who have purchased lime all of their lives, are barred from the scheme simply because they happen to be north of the Border and are not licensed by the Department in the South, and now here we have another situation. It is ironic at a time when so much effort has gone into working at a European level to ensure that there will be no hardening of the Border in our country that the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is putting in place what is effectively hardening of the Border in terms of the ability of farmers to operate North-South and vice versa. Therefore, Deputy Martin Browne and I tabled our amendment to emphasise the importance of the need for the Minister to make efforts to address those issues, particularly in respect of the fertiliser database prior to the introduction of the new arrangements. I hope that the Minister will be amenable to ensuring that will happen because if we implement this order as it currently stands then there will be a further divergence North and South, which would be very damaging.