Fiona O'Loughlin (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

At a recent public meeting on agriculture that I hosted in Kildare with my good friend and colleague, Deputy McConalogue, the issue of EU over-regulation was raised. Farmers in Kildare, and I have no doubt throughout the country, want assurance that our Government is fighting for them and not being bound by regulations that may suit other countries that have different climates to the one enjoyed by us at the edge of Europe. Until recent years, we had but one single strain of potato blight to contend with in Ireland, but the arrival on our shores of a second type had the result of turning one line of blight into a family tree. Luckily, the new strains of blight have remained somewhat susceptible to copper, and this allows farmers to grow potatoes with a reasonable natural resistance to the disease.

However, I was contacted by constituents who became concerned when discovering there was a difficulty using copper, as no company had registered a copper product as a fungicide in Ireland. This has been done in most other EU member states. Ireland is just one of five countries not to have done so. The other four do not have a similar climate to Ireland's, which is susceptible to the potato blight. Even though copper is a trace element that is essential for all forms of life, it faces an uncertain future as a fungicide since the EU seems to want to ban it.

When purchased, copper sulphate comes in a bag marked for use as a feed additive for animals. Is copper a feed or a toxin?

See this speech in context