Bobby Aylward (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Government must take urgent action to safeguard the livelihood of farmers in the beef sector. The motion features 14 policy actions which we believe the Government must accept immediately, including seeking market disturbance aid from the EU as outlined under the Common Agricultural Policy, CAP; opening the Brexit loan scheme, which was first announced in 2017, to farmers; increasing live exports of calves by enhancing lairage capacity, as has been mentioned twice; ensuring that the next CAP is fully funded; and providing a €200 suckler cow payment, as well as the introduction of a beef market index. We also call for a full review of the quality payment system grid and more robust measures for carcass trimming and grading, including publishing details of on-the-spot fines for factories breaching carcass trimming rules. It is also my party's view that a new independent authority is required to enforce the new EU directive on unfair trading practices to ensure that farmers will buy in.

I received a response to a parliamentary question from the Minister yesterday which was full of terminology about the Department's acute understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves, bilateral discussions with the European Commissioner, Phil Hogan, and the position that the UK has taken on this and that, which presents various challenges for A, B or C. I read an awful lot of rhetoric but nothing by way of concrete Government action. We should be better placed than we are to absorb the potential hits to the beef sector, given that we have a man who is Irish, a member of Fine Gael and from Kilkenny in the position of European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, but the Government is failing to take advantage of this. This wait-and-see approach and the conveyance to the public via soundbite that it is a UK problem, which has been adopted by Fine Gael in the past two years, will not wash with the beef sector, which is all but obliterated. The beef sector and suckler farmers are at their wits' end. They can take no more from a Government that has shown only ambivalence to their challenges. Hard Brexit or soft Brexit, both scenarios are bad for the farming sector, although a hard Brexit could decimate it.

It is an indictment of the Minister and the Government that farmers in this country, who produce the best beef in the world, having fed the cattle grass and reared them for between two and two and a half years, cannot make a profit from the animals. There is something wrong with the system in this country when farmers do not receive fair pay for what they produce. The Minister must wake up and see the wrong in that regard. Factories and cartels are creaming off but the man or woman who produces the animal for fillets of beef is being left behind. Something needs to be done to change the system.

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