Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank David Mullins, Brian Ó Domhnaill and Deputy Nolan for their hard work on this motion. I am perplexed by the Government. I did not hear anyone move an amendment. The Government seems to have adopted a habit recently of allowing these motions to pass to let its backbenchers off the hook. Government Deputies can stand at the factory gates with the farmers and say they are with them, which makes a mockery of them, as Deputy O'Donoghue said. Farmers are smart, well-educated people who understand a three card trick when they see one. That is what is happening today.

The programme for Government, Our Shared Future, includes a commitment to "Ensure fairness, equity, and transparency in the food chain by establishing a new authority". This will be another quango to be set up with a brass plate on the wall, big seats and fancy furniture. It will be another cabal. That is what we will have. We want a regulator with teeth and we will probably have to go outside the country to get one if we get the legislation passed. We will introduce a Private Members' Bill to put this into action. The regulator has to have teeth and powers, unlike all the other regulators we have. As Deputy O'Donoghue and others said, what is going on in this country is like rubbing butter on a fat sow's you-know-what.

I thank Sinn Féin, People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, the Labour Party and the others who supported our motion. They know what is going on. The beef tribunal told us what was going on 30 years ago. It was as clear as the nose on our face. The cheek of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil; they are in bed with the beef moguls. At least Deputy Heydon, and the Minister of State from Athlone, Deputy Peter Burke, were born and reared on farms and understand farming, although they can see the sector being diminished before their eyes.

I will not give a history lesson about where I come from. Everyone knows that I come from the mountains in Tipperary where we tried to eke a living from sheep farming. A farmer left that hill in Kilnacarriga with six ewes. Thankfully he had a fine family and we are here. The lifeblood has been drained out of the people of rural Ireland. There are 10,000 jobs for 70,000 beef farmers. They know a cartel when they see one. Some of the farming organisations are good. Independent farmers came to the gates last year to bring Dublin to a halt. It was not that they wanted to do so but that they were desperate. They cannot keep trading at a loss. I salute the mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and the whole meitheal that used to be on the farm. Now they cannot afford to keep anyone on the farm.

The Green Party, through the programme for Government, will not let people build a house unless they are a designated son or daughter and have a landholding of 40 ha. All the rest of the family can go to hell or Connacht. Cromwell is back in the form of the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, with his policies, the 2040 plan and the planning regulator. It is a dictatorship. Where has democracy gone? Where is the freedom that Dan Breen, Michael Collins and all the others fought and died for throughout this country? We sold it out to big business, which is controlling us. We cannot interfere in the market but the Government can vote through and implement the universal social charge or any tax it likes. It implemented a carbon tax in the last Finance Act and we cannot even vote on it again for the next ten years. It says we cannot interfere but we are not asking it to interfere. We are asking it to stand up and face down four big beef cartels.

I ask the Minister of State to sit the Tánaiste down and explain to him what a beef mogul or beef baron is. He does not know what they are. For him, they are a figment of the imagination. He was our Taoiseach and wants to be Taoiseach again but he does not know what a beef baron is. Get the wellies on him and march him down to see the factory farmers. Some are now owned by former IFA presidents. They are screwing the very people who worked for the IFA and other organisations for years, and are still members. This is what happens when they control the feedlots and we have the four-movement and 30-month rules. We were told earlier by Deputy Fitzmaurice that these rules are an issue because the factories need the beef. The rules were put in place by Ministers over the years at the behest of those funding the big parties and some Independents. We know that. It is quite obvious. You get what you pay for and that is what the Government got. It is destroying the farmers.

We want rural Ireland to be sustainable. All the money a farm gets is spent locally on contractors and local merchants, self-employed people and the people they employ, whether that is farm relief or ordinary labourers. There were 10,000 jobs. We saw during the Covid crisis the way workers are blackguarded. Look at the conditions that workers in those factories are living in. There are ten of them to a bed and maybe 30 to a house. What kind of history and dirty linen are we going to have exposed in 30 years by countries that send their people here expecting them to be looked after? Irish people went all over the world to work. We worked hard and we were not treated too badly. We were certainly not treated like that. We were treated with respect and dignity. There is no dignity or respect in this industry for the farmers, producers or workers, and the Government knows that. It will happily continue to let things proceed so badly or it will set up an ombudsman. We have ombudsmen for everything. They are toothless, useless and fruitless. They have staff, a team and an office, with a plaque on the front wall. People can come in to make their complaints but they might as well write to Santa Claus because they would get better answers. It is all a ploy.

We are not only talking about the beef industry today. I see the Taoiseach has arrived. I welcome him back from Brussels. He is well aware of his party's connections with the beef industry for the last 30 years. He has been at the centre of Governments since the 1990s and he kept the previous Government propped up with the so-called confidence and supply arrangement. The Government tells us that this is not going on and it is a figment of our imagination. The Rural Independent Group will not stop until such time as we have some kind of fairness.

The Irish Farm Film Producers Group, IFFPG, which was set up to deal with plastics, has become a monopoly. It was founded by some senior members of the IFA. It has wiped out the small producers such as Declan Doocey in Lismore and others. Representatives of the IFFPG appears before the committee last Tuesday and told bare-faced porkies. They told the committee that the plant in the midlands was recycling 50% of the plastic collected.

See this speech in context