Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I suppose it goes back to the old adage that the farmer is the one person who pays a retail price for his or her inputs and takes a wholesale price for his or her outputs. That is the crux of this issue. The cost that farmers have to pay for fertiliser, feed, diesel for the tractor or whatever is constantly climbing, yet they see their margins getting tighter and tighter. This is the issue at hand. While new markets will assist, we need to be going for the top shelf. We need to make sure we are getting the top price for the very high-quality product we export all over the world. Unfortunately, that has not always been the case. We need to work harder to make sure that we can come up with innovative means of reducing the cost for farmers as much as possible while also increasing the price they get for the product they produce. Too often, it has been the case that the people in the middle make most of the money. It is the farmer that takes all the risks, gets up at night to make sure the cow calves and looks after the lambs. The farmers do all of that work, yet they take the least when it comes to the squeeze in the market.

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