Ms Sinéad McPhillips:

I thank the Senator. I fully understand the points she is making. On the SPS standards - the food safety animal health and plant standards - they are EU standards and are there to protect EU consumers. They apply to all food, be it produced in the EU or imported. The Commission has committed to increasing the number of SPS audits and checks in third countries and to strengthening controls on the ground to ensure those standards are upheld. On production standards, which are environmental standards of production and animal welfare standards, the Commission has also committed to rolling out initiatives to better align the production standards of imported products with EU production standards. That is somewhere we would like to see more detail from the Commission on what that means in practice.