Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

One other thing just strikes me in all of this. Another big contradiction is that we have 600,000 people in this country suffering from food poverty. Is that not an extraordinary contradiction as well? We are one of the biggest producers of food in the world and yet 600,000 people, mostly elderly people, children of the less well-off and so on, are suffering extreme food poverty. It seems to me that it is in those contradictions and in recognising those contradictions that, in a way, some of the solutions are to be found. One of the amazing contradictions of the Famine was that people starved while food was being exported out of the country. Is that not something on which the State should intervene? Should it not buy, at a reasonable price, the good quality food that is produced by our farmers? The State in the interests of farmers and society could set the prices and make directions on that decent quality food. This is decent quality food as opposed to the sugared rubbish produced by multinationals that is causing obscene levels of obesity among our young people and, in particular, the less well-off who have to rely, because of price factors, on the worst quality food when this country actually produces some of the best quality food in the world, although the farmers who are producing it are struggling to survive and are being driven out of business by the big corporates and the multinationals.

My final point concerns the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP. I have not got time to go through the list of the dangers that TTIP represents in terms of food quality, standards and so on. However, to cut a long story short, small and medium enterprises and the quality of farming and food produce will be destroyed if we do not stop this TTIP juggernaut right now.

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