Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I commend the Minister of State and his officials on introducing this Bill. It is long overdue. I have been asking in the Dáil when the commitment in the programme for Government to empower ComReg to apply administrative sanctions would be introduced. I kept being told that it was coming, but it is finally here. I hope that it will be effective and lead to a change in how telecommunication services are provided.

Recently, we had a celebrated example of a company winning a great customer service award, namely, Eir. It was so confident in its win that it immediately blocked all replies on Twitter from anyone who might question the win. Subsequently, it transpired that Eir had bought the win.

Another organisation that received an award for its services was RTÉ News, but that is an entirely different story and not one I do intend to get into here today. The bottom line, however, is that Eir has been reviled by its customers for quite some time. It appears to have improved its customer service somewhat in recent months but has a long way to go and is far from unique in how it provides customer service. I hope that ComReg is empowered to take action on behalf of ordinary consumers across this State because there are consumers who cannot get broadband and are awaiting it under the national broadband plan. There are also those who in theory have broadband but whose service is completely inadequate. In such cases, the telecommunications provider, be it Eir or one of its competitors, is not fulfilling its contractual obligations at all and people can get no redress. I hope this will be addressed and that ComReg will have the power to tackle such rogue operators, be they rogue operators that have to buy customer service awards or others.

We talk a lot about working from home and its importance. I expect it is as important to the Minister of State's constituency as it is to mine that there be a facility to work from home, be it every day or some days per week. It enables young couples, older couples and young singletons to live in our constituencies while working for companies in our major urban centres in a way that would not have been possible heretofore. That has a large number of benefits because we need to see more balanced regional development instead of having all economic activity concentrated in certain urban centres that do not have the infrastructure to deal with the required level of development, while other parts of the country are simultaneously abandoned. Driving through most of the market towns of Ireland, we can see the large-scale abandonment of buildings. If lucky, we see some commercial activity in ground-floor premises. We see that nobody is living overhead and that a number of buildings are derelict. The ability to work from home is a means of addressing this problem but it has to be accompanied by an adequate telecommunications service. Therein lies a great challenge for the Government. I am referring to its rolling out of broadband but also to its empowering of the regulator to ensure contracts are adhered to. I very much hope that is brought about by a Bill. I commend the Minister of State on introducing this Bill.

There are a couple of other areas that I wish to turn to in the time available about which I am perhaps a little less optimistic. One such area, the beef sector, has been alluded to by previous speakers. While I was in the Chamber, Deputy Conway Walsh of Sinn Féin raised it towards the end of her contribution. We do not have any anticompetitive practices in the beef sector, according to our competition authority. We have never been found to have any anticompetitive practices in the sector. There are four major firms involved - one very big, another big and two slightly smaller. They control the beef sector. The sector is obviously very important to Irish agriculture. Year in, year out, prices rise and fall in unison; there is never more than a cent or two in the difference between the prices of those concerned. Farmers have long complained of anticompetitive practices in this regard but none have ever been found. In fact, I wasted my time writing to call for an investigation into the beef sector when I was a Deputy in a former Dáil. There is a degree to which the CCPC has demonstrated a lack of awareness of how the sector operates. Deputy Bruton talked about the capacity to introduce sanctions for the abuse of personal data. In the beef sector, the processors have all the data. They know how many cattle are in Ireland right now. They know how many cattle aged 21, 28, 29, 30 or 34 months are in Ireland and can set their price accordingly. It is not necessarily anticompetitive because the information is at least available from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, but its effect is to stifle competition in the sector. Prices will rise and fall in tandem because the processors know exactly how many cattle are available. Some years ago, they were facilitated by the BSE crisis through the introduction of the so-called 30-month rule, whereby people are rewarded for getting rid of their cattle at 30 months. In reality, it operates as a penalty. A farmer are penalised if his cattle are not killed by 30 months. If someone knows how many cattle aged 28 and 29 months are in the country at any given time and that live exports are not happening, for a variety of reasons, he or she can control the price. I appreciate there are animal rights arguments against live exports. Some of those arguments are slightly exaggerated, for commercial benefit. The benefit accrues to the beef processors because, if it can be ensured that cattle can leave Ireland only in one way, dead, they have to be killed in Ireland. If the processors know how many cattle are of a particular age, they just set the price; it is very simple.

Anybody who has anything to do with the beef sector will know phone calls are regularly made and that smaller operators fear the bigger operators. There are not many of them but there is still a fear factor because ABP is a huge operator. It could wipe a processor out overnight, in the same way that Cement Roadstone Holdings, CRH, could wipe out, and has wiped out, people in the quarry business. We have to acknowledge realities in this House.

The aforementioned factor has to be considered. Nobody is going to investigate it or determine what we can do about but it is going to be made worse by a couple of new steps. Like the Minister of State, I grew up in a village, Scariff. There were two butchers in the village when I was growing up. It is not all that long ago. I might look old but I am 47. Both butchers in the village were able to kill cattle or pigs. They did not kill horses for feed, unlike ABP, but they did kill cattle, sheep and pigs. The policy of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine was to wipe out those abattoirs, the thinking being that they were a nuisance and that it could not be dealing with small producers, no more than it wanted to be dealing with small cheese producers. The production of cheese in farmhouses across Ireland is inherently dangerous because cheese is made by bacteria, so the view was to sacrifice them. I once had a meeting with representatives of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in Limerick but they did not say what I am saying. I could never accuse them of saying it. Regarding the people I represented, namely small cheese producers in a region where there had been a listeria outbreak, the Department was taking the opportunity to drive them under or get rid of them. There is a policy to abolish the small producers. It might not be stated to us but it is stated among people who work in the business.

I am glad the Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth, is present because the Green Party has a policy of promoting small food producers, craft producers and farmhouse producers. It is important that this happens, but what happens on the ground and what is promoted by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine are entirely different. The aim is to wipe out the small producers and regard them as a nuisance. If there is a listeria outbreak in a farmhouse producing cheese, the Department will say, perhaps rightly, that it could threaten infant milk exports to China. The approach is to ask why a risk should be taken for the sake of small producers producing a product that a couple of hundred people love when there is a need to protect the huge Chinese market. However, if we go down that road far enough, we will end up with just one person producing a product. That is where we are heading in the beef sector by wiping out the small abattoirs.

With regard to the number of regional vets employed, I understand they are paid through central government but employed by local councils. There are fewer and fewer of those positions available. When those positions are no longer available, there cannot be an abattoir. There cannot be an abattoir without a vet who can occasionally inspect. Year on year, we are reducing the number of places where cattle, sheep and pigs can be killed in Ireland and concentrating production into the hands of a small number.

That is not anti-competitive. That is fine; it is just business. However, it is a business model that has the same result as anti-competitive practices. There are small producers being driven to the wall. There are large multinationals making more and more money, to the extent that the controlling shareholder of one of them can own the building the Department of Health rents, while small farmers that produce money go to the wall. The shareholder to whom I referred is obviously a better businessman than the others - he would not own the building otherwise - but we need to look at the huge imbalance that exists.

I want to mention two things that in my view are going to make that worse, if inadvertently. The first is the application for protected geographical indication for beef. This is going to be brought in for grass-finished Irish beef. If the application is successful, it will be good news in theory because all beef finished in Ireland will be grass-finished Irish beef because, thankfully, the majority of beef cattle spend most of their lives outdoors. We have not yet reached the stage, although I think we will, unfortunately, where there are cattle that are 24 months old and have never seen grass under them or the sky over them. Personally, I find that immoral on some level. I am a farmer and I produce beef to be killed and eaten. I find it immoral that cattle would never see anything other than a roof over them and concrete under them. It offends me. I do not know exactly why it offends me, but it does. It seems to be so contrary to what is natural and to what farmers and generations of farmers did before me.

If every animal in Ireland is going to be grass-finished Irish beef, then what is the scope for the producers' groups? We were told the producers' groups could come together and perhaps apply for protected designation of origin, for example, for Burren beef, east Clare beef, Mullingar beef or Ballynacarrigy beef – take your pick. We were told they could apply for protected designation of origin that would be recognised and they could, perhaps, argue for a higher price from the big players such as ABP, Dawn Meats, Slaney Foods and Kepak. Now the Government has taken that from them by applying for this recognition for Ireland. If everybody has it, then it becomes worthless. It is like inflation. We are inflating away the possibility and the bargaining chips these farmers have.

The other thing that has recently been feted is ABP's advantage beef programme, which sounds great because it is about traceability. It is about ensuring less movement of cattle. It basically means there will be a 20 cent per kg bonus for cattle that are killed on the grid. The grid price will be averaged across all ABP and Slaney Foods plants. I think there are seven of them. The price will be averaged across them in any event. However, the conditions are the cattle will have to have been on not more than two farms during their lives and they have to be at least a year on the farm on which they are killed. That all sounds great for the consumers, but the actual effect of that is to ensure farmers cannot have cattle that were bought in a mart the year before they are killed.

Marts were introduced in the 1960s and the 1970s to ensure some degree of transparency in what was always, I suppose, a slightly murky business, but at least there were multifaceted places that cattle could be killed. Cattle were being brought to Dublin and shipped live to the Port of Bristol and elsewhere in the UK at the time. While there was no transparency in it, there was a greater degree of competition. If that is taken out, then the beef processors are being further empowered to set a price.

What happens when we do not have enough cattle? Sometimes supply does not quite meet demand. That happened last summer in the Irish beef business. It was a rare and a wonderful thing. Beef prices are good at the moment; I am not saying that they are not. However, I am very much afraid of the power of processors when beef prices and international beef prices take a turn. I am afraid of their power to use that to ensure they are insulated from the downturn in the market and ordinary producers get screwed. That is what they do. What happens when demand exceeds supply is processors have to go to the marts to buy finished cattle. They have to pay a market price for them. Lo and behold, they actually have to compete with one another for cattle in the marts. Then the farmers realise the processors are actually making more per kilo than the farmers thought they were, so the farmers can demand more per kilo. That is what happened last summer.

Apparently, this advantage scheme is being brought in with the backing of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. The Department backs anything that is advantageous to the big beef processors and the big dairy co-operatives to the detriment of small producers, whom they regard as a nuisance. If there is a scheme such as the one that is being proposed by ABP, then one cannot go to the marts. There will be less trade going through the marts and there will be even less transparency in a very non-transparent market. That, I have to say, worries me. There is a requirement that cattle have to be 12 months on a farm, with the exception of bull beef, which only has to be on a farm for six months. If there is a rationale for the 12-month requirement, then surely there is a rationale for the six-month requirement. One does not see young bulls traded in marts as much as cows and steers.

The scheme undermines one of the few areas in which we have transparency in the food chain in Ireland. There is no transparency in what the beef processors pay. They buy cattle and we do not know what they pay for them. They are using more and more feedlots. Of course, when supply wanes a bit, they are able to empty those feedlots to suppress prices. There is no transparency around what the retailers pay the processors. There is no transparency around the conditions attached to it that they be, for example, Angus beef, Hereford beef, 30 months old, 33 months old or 36 months old, the extent to which consumers want that, or the extent to which it is actually a ploy the processors have to suppress prices. There no transparency around any of that. However, there is transparency around what cattle of 450 kg, 550 kg, or whatever weight are making in the marts on a given day or week. That is absolutely transparent.

This programme, to me, is an attempt to undermine that and remove the one little bit of transparency farmers have. Of course, it is justified on other bases because there will be less movement and more certainty, and the cattle will all come from Bord Bia quality assured herds. However, up to now there has been a requirement that to finish cattle, they have to have come from a Bord Bia quality assured herd, unless they are being bought a long time before they are killed. I do not accept and I question the rationale for the programme.

That said, I am not convinced these are issues that can easily be addressed by way of legislation. I think a culture change is required in how we produce food, how we promote the food we produce and how we encourage food producers. It seems to me that, for a long time now, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has been corralling producers down one lane, and that is towards greater intensification. For example, farmers are told that if there is a lake in the middle of their farm, they should take it out because it is a waste of time. They are told that if there is a hedgerow, they should take it out because it is a waste of space. At the same time, we have a Government that is rightly promoting biodiversity. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine - inadvertently, perhaps - is promoting forms of agriculture that are completely detrimental to that. Therefore, we need to take a step back.

I do not think that what I have highlighted or sought to highlight can be addressed by way of anti-competition legislation. It is a political issue, but it is about who holds political sway in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. I do not mean it is about which party holds sway. The question is whether it is a Department for food producers or a Department for large-scale multinational beef packers and co-operatives that are increasingly moving away from the farmer base that heretofore owned them and controlled them. I fear the dairy sector will go the same way as the beef sector in that it will become, in a way, controlled by processors rather than controlled by producers.

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