Mr. Philip Carroll:

Deputy Danny Healy-Rae spoke about compliance in the context of climate change and suggested that there is a degree of fabrication regarding that issue. At farm and factory level, the agrifood sector has been meeting the compliance requirements relating to climate change. There are costs associated with doing that work. The reality with regard to climate change is close to hitting home. The Joint Committee on Climate Change's recommendations suggest that there will have to be a serious effort made to meet our targets by 2030. We realise that we have a hell of a lot of work to do in that regard because we are not going to meet the 2020 targets. For me, the question is who will bear the cost of that mitigation because it will be an enormous bill when it comes for somebody in the chain of supply. There are ways in which that will be mitigated in other sectors through subsidies but nobody is mentioning subsidies when it comes to the agrifood sector.

Deputy Scanlon mentioned issues which he said pointed to farmers being treated extremely unfairly. I stated earlier that I am of the view that farmers are having a tough time in the market but that I do not believe they are being treated unfairly by processors. The latter are also having an extremely tough time in the market. Deputy Danny Healy-Rae also stated that farmers took a price reduction at the beginning of Brexit. That is true. There was a 17% devaluation in sterling over a six-week period at that time. That was a direct consequence of Brexit.

I will now respond to the issues raised by the Chairman. We need to know that we have some degree of support from the Government in respect of Brexit mitigation. If we hit those tariff levels, our product will be devalued enormously if we have to go into the UK market and meet a considerably lower market price. All we can do in those circumstances is move product to other higher paying markets but those higher paying markets will become lower paying markets as a direct consequence of Brexit. The European market will be devalued and third-country markets will also be devalued by virtue of our being locked out of the higher priced UK market. We need Commissioner Hogan, the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine to stand over their promise that they will have the industry's back should there be a hard Brexit. We faced that possibility in March and April and we may well have to face it again in May. We are not out of the woods yet. That is the core message that must go out from this committee.

The second core message relates to climate change. We all know that retrofitting 1.5 million houses will not happen without subsidies. In that regard, the cost per house will be €50,000.