Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

With regard to the Mercosur deal, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay will potentially put 99,000 tonnes of South American beef into our markets in Europe. This is at a time when Ireland produces the best beef in the world. The Minister can have no doubt about that. There are no hormones, full traceability and the highest of production standards. Irish beef is an excellent product. Our farmers are doing their best, yet at the same time they cannot make a proper profit on it. What is being proposed does not make sense. We in Ireland are being told to cut our stock of animals and plant trees. At the same time, the Mercosur deal is being done with countries that do not have the same level of traceability or production standards and they are felling thousands of acres of rainforest to raise the beef they want to trade into our economies.

What is being proposed is crazy.

I want to give the Minister some hard facts. Today cattle prices are between €3.65 and €3.75 per kg. Heifers might be worth 10 cent more. In today's money, it should be €4.30 per kg coming off grass just to barely break even and pay bills. The Government is leaving our farmers down by not being outraged and fighting. We have a Taoiseach who said the other day that he could perhaps envisage a situation in which the Government might support the deal. I do not see how any Minister or backbencher could stand over that statement. To do so would be letting our farming community and economy down. It would go down in history as what I would consider a fairly bad decision. Having said that, it is the Taoiseach - I hate talking about somebody when he is not here - who came out with the statement that he was going to save Ireland by reducing his own meat intake. I cannot understand for the life of me how any person representing Ireland, a Taoiseach, as he is supposed to be for all of Ireland, could come out with such a statement.

When there was a backlash over the past couple of days over what the Taoiseach said, the Government said it would support and encourage an economic assessment. I will tell you what an economic assessment is. Leave your ivory towers and go out and ask any farmer trying to produce beef, make a profit and keep the family farm open about an economic assessment and he or she will say he or she cannot make money as matters stand, before the deal. One can imagine what this deal will mean to such farmers and their families.

Let me ask the Minister about the €100 million cattle deal or beef deal being discussed. This is nothing more than a smokescreen because the farmer on the ground has got nothing, is getting nothing and probably will get nothing. If the Mercosur deal goes ahead, the land will not be stocked and our farmers will get poorer and poorer until they are driven out of existence. I ask the Government to remember this is predominantly a farming country. Our farmers have to be protected.

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