Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I hope the Government's acceptance of this motion this evening is not a political response aimed at deflecting criticism and giving the Minister cover as he proceeds. The motion tabled by Deputy McConalogue contains 14 proposals that the Government is now signing up to but what we have not seen so far is any sense of urgency or even a belief that there is a crisis here. The Minister of State, Deputy Doyle, spoke about a lot of things that are in the distance, including the next CAP programme but there are many in the Gallery this evening and around the country who will not survive the current CAP programme because of the Government's lack of urgency. I contrast the lack of urgency in dealing with the beef situation with the fact that we are sitting tomorrow evening to deal with emergency legislation on sea-fisheries. The Government has put a considerable amount of work into resolving that issue and we need to see the same sense of urgency directed at the beef sector.

We have a broken beef market and the people paying the price for that are not the beef barons but farmers and particularly the small farmers of this country. We have a broken market in which the Government refuses to ask the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to intervene. The Minister is dilly-dallying, along with his colleague, the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation. They do not seem to understand the need for intervention. Why are farmers here getting so much less than what consumers are paying for beef? Why is Irish beef being sold at a price that is so much lower than that being paid in the UK and across Europe? We need answers to these questions from the independent authorities equipped to provide them.

Like Deputy Niall Collins, I am also struck by the paucity of the attendance in the Chamber this evening. If any other organisation had mobilised tens of thousands of people in the way that the IFA and Beef Plan have done, it would be headline news and there would be a full Chamber this evening. It seems that we are determined to take our farmers for granted and to leave them behind. We do not need words from the Minister and we do not need him accepting motions for the sake of it. We need action.

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