Mr. Michael Burke:

There is a common answer to both points Senator Quinn raised, about food processing and agriculture and about how people internalise the partition Ireland has experienced. At an economic level, that is dealt with by branding. It is true that food processing adds more value to the production process than agriculture, but we cannot simply gear everything towards food processing and not concern ourselves with the agriculture sector. Apart from anything else, there will be major social deprivation as a result, which would destroy far more jobs and livelihoods than a world-beating food-processing sector would create, because a world-beating food-processing sector in Ireland would rely very much on capital investment and not on labour. The way to overcome that is to turn what is already a very productive food-processing sector into a world-beating one through the branding of Irish products. That does not happen on anything like the scale it should. I am old enough to remember, as are others here, how Kerrygold launched the career of Tony O'Reilly. That happened because a very good-quality product was turned into a global brand. People in all parts of this island would be very happy to buy Irish linen, or whatever, if they, like everyone else, saw it as the best in the world. To do that on an all-island basis requires an all-island economy, but that is what we should aim for.