Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I remember helping as a buachaill óg - I was 13 at the time - the enthusiastic Fianna Fáil team that was pushing to join the EU. We did join it. We got benefits from it, let us face it, but they have dried up. Now we have regulations and sifting and Ministers going over to Europe to ask, "How do you want us to jump today?". We are the best boys in Europe; that is the fact of it. We are getting penalised. Punitive measures are being imposed on us by Europe, yet we are the best boys in the class and take what we get. If we are asked to do 100 lines, we say we will do 200.

Where the definition of a young farmer is concerned, anyone over 35 is on the scrapheap. Our pig industry is lying in tatters. The Commissioner for Agriculture appeared before the agriculture committee and said we should use every tool in the toolbox, but the Government did not even open the toolbox and look for money. What is going on with it at all?

I appreciate many EU directives and people's recourse to the European courts when ours will not give any sense of justice. I am very sad, however. I am not celebrating Europe Day either. We are now ignoring conflicts all over the world. Christians are being slaughtered in different parts of the world but now that there is savagery going on in Ukraine — it is savagery — we are all on top of it. It goes on elsewhere as well but there is not a peep out of us. So, what is going on? Not-too-savoury things are going on, yet we wonder why we had Brexit and things like that. We need a total re-evaluation of where we are going as a people. I am not referring to the Government because it does not lead the people anymore; it dictates to the people. The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, is dictating and the Taoiseach cannot even answer the questions. He could not even mention the name of his former great leader today when Deputy Michael Collins raised Seán Lemass. He could not bear to speak his name. Lemass was a visionary, and visionaries came after him, but now, as an island off Europe, Ireland is left on the scrapheap. Our fishing and agriculture industries have been decimated and everything else as well, yet we get nothing only regulation after regulation, being the good boys in Europe, and "Croppies, lie down".

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