Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will answer these two questions and then, hopefully, come back to the Deputy's questions. I assure Deputy Ó Cuív that there is no laissez-faire attitude coming from me. We are continuing to work as hard as we can to get the best possible price for Irish beef by building its reputation all over the world, particularly in the UK and further afield. Outside of the bull beef story which has specific problems that I have just outlined, the evidence shows that we are doing a good job. The brand of Irish beef is stronger than it has ever been. For a prolonged period of time, we have been getting higher prices compared to the rest of the EU than ever before.

We have a specific problem with the UK because British consumers and retailers have a preference and will pay more for British-reared, slaughtered and finished beef. However, we are still selling the equivalent of 750,000 animals slaughtered into the UK. There is a free market. Yes, we can take live animals to the UK. It is not as easy as perhaps it could be because some of the roll-on, roll-off ferries do not want to facilitate that and that is their commercial decision. The truth is that even if we could take large volumes of live cattle to the UK, we still have the problems I outlined before. My understanding is that factories and processors in the UK are not looking for live Irish cattle because they must separate them from the British cattle they are slaughtering and label them separately because, at Ireland's insistence, we have country of origin labelling in respect of beef, which is a good thing for us because the brand of Irish beef is on the rise. The fact that British consumers want a certain type of product and are willing to pay more for it is part of the explanation as to why we have a price differential between Irish and British beef in the UK market.

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