Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

None of that small, rural perspective for me - I am all over the world tonight.

I will start by talking about the radio programme that is broadcast early on a Saturday morning that looks at country life and talks to farmers, which I like. Recently, the programme makers went all over Ireland talking to farmers about the fodder crisis and the honesty of the farmers involved was quite impressive. Many of them were saying that they were being stretched beyond their capacity. The message I got from the ordinary families who were interviewed was that family farmers are struggling with what sounded like horrific day to day realities. They spoke about pulling dead animals off their farms. Farmers and their wives were literally crying because their animals were dying in front of them from starvation. I remember one woman describing the howls of hungry animals. That must be a terribly painful experience to go through, no matter how callous one might be. I do not believe that the farmers of this country, particularly those with small and medium-sized farms, are in any way callous. They spoke honestly about the fact that there is a problem in this country and that farmers are being consistently driven beyond their capability not just by the Department, the Government and policy from this House, but also by their own representative organisations and media such as the Farmers Journaltelling them that now is the time to grow their herds and so forth.As we have heard tonight from people who are more familiar with rural Ireland than me, the small and medium-sized farmer does not gain. Larry Goodman, who we bailed out in the past and who has just won most of the big contract with China this week, will do very nicely, but the small and medium-sized farmer is struggling to meet the capacity targets to which they are being stretched and there is a real problem with that.

In June 2017, there were 7.3 million cattle here, an increase of 10% in cattle over two years of age, 3% in cattle under two years of age and 2.5% in dairy cows. By anybody's estimation in a country of this size, that is over-production in the middle of climate change and this is where my global point comes in. I am a member, along with Deputy Stanley and others, of the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment. On the one hand, we agonise in a big way about climate change and how we are going to reduce our emissions while on the other, the policy of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is to get everybody to breed more cattle, export more cattle and do major deals with other countries. The Ceann Comhairle will remember when Ibrahim Halawa was still in prison in Egypt that I complained bitterly that this Government seemed to be able to do cattle export deals on an enormous scale with Egypt and Saudi Arabia but did not seem to be able to deal with the continued incarceration of one of its own citizens in Egypt.

9 o’clock

When the Minister announced this week that additional markets are to be opened up, he said "the world is literally our oyster in terms of" cattle exports. He suggested that this could be the tip of the iceberg. He has been quoted all over the media. We all woke up on Monday morning to hear that the Minister, Deputy Creed, has made the great discovery that we can push beef on people in the most populated country in the world who have never eaten beef before. Equally, it seems that we can push beef on people in the Middle East who usually live off sheep and goats. We have not begun to think globally about what crazy levels of food production, as a result of recent changes, are doing to the health of the population of the planet and, most importantly, to climate change.

I would like to quote from a document I found on the Internet in which the president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, ICMSA, had some interesting things to say:

Knackeries are flat out collecting dead animals, which shows just how bad things are. If the Minister is in any doubt, he should talk to the people who are at the coalface... it is equally the case that even where there is fodder, the long winter and atrocious weather is also leading to increased levels of animal disease such as pneumonia.

He added that it is time to stop the relentless focus at all costs on increased production and higher stocking rates, suggesting that "we are witnessing those consequences now and, with two crises in the last five years, the trend is bound to continue". He referred to the "glorification" of rapid dairy expansion and said:

As soon as you get bad weather the wheels come off. There is a knock-on impact on all other farmers as the big operators then have to panic buy large quantities of feed at any cost... There can be no doubt this crisis is having an animal welfare impact and farmers no longer want to hear about a transport subsidy that hasn't worked, they need subsidies to buy feed now.

It is obvious that the Minister sat on this crisis for long enough. He responded to it late. This is why he is getting such a huge reaction to it.

I will finish on the question of climate change. In October 2013, after the last big fodder crisis, a researcher, Dr. Stephen Flood, warned that the severe future impacts of climate change on Irish agriculture would see a repeat of this type of crisis. When climate-fuelled extreme weather conditions, from hurricanes to major flooding episodes and unseasonal cold snaps, batter Ireland with monotonous regularity, they hit the agriculture sector hardest. The de factoposition of Ireland's major farming group appears to be one of outright denial of the dangerous reality of climate change. When Fianna Fáil Deputies introduced this motion earlier this evening, they started by saying "we cannot blame the Minister [or the Government] for the weather". I disagree. While we cannot blame the Minister directly for the weather on a daily basis, we can blame the Minister and the Government for keeping their eyes and ears shut to the reality of climate change while pushing our policies in an opposite direction.

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