Paul Lawless (Mayo, Aontú)

I welcome the farming organisations this evening and thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion. Last week, the Climate Change Advisory Council of Ireland outlined that if we continue on our current trajectory around carbon emissions, this country will face up to €26 billion of fines by 2030. It is an incredible sum of money - €26 billion. At the same time that our European institutions, and indeed our Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments, have signed us up to these fines, they are also about to sign us up to the Mercosur trade deal, which will see 99,000 tonnes of beef from Europe, deforestation across Latin America and the importation of substandard beef at a carbon cost of three to six times that of Irish beef.

How does that make sense? How does it make sense that we will pay up to €26 billion in fines by 2030?

On the other hand, we are going to sign this trade deal, which will have a devastating impact for our climate. Who is this going to benefit? We have some of the best beef in the world, with some of the strictest and toughest environmental standards, and standards right across our food sector. The beef that we are going to import is a verifiable health risk, with 17-beta-estradiol, a growth hormone that is widely found and widely used in cattle production in the Mercosur countries. It is classified as a carcinogenic. The use of hormones is completely banned across Europe. It is completely banned in Ireland, yet we want to import this into Ireland and right across the European Union. We have seen these double standards not just in this beef deal but also in the tillage sector, which knows all too well about this. The fact is that genetically modified grain is coming into Ireland and the European Union and is competing with Irish native grain, and yet we cannot engage in that. How does that make sense?

I sat in the committee this evening and we spoke to our Polish counterparts. We are working to try and build alliance across the European Union, but that is what the Government should be doing here. It is what the Minister for agriculture should be doing. I think we do have support in that regard. We saw the electioneering that went on at the ploughing championships and at agricultural shows across the country before the general election. All of those commitments seem to be forgotten. The language this evening was incredibly vague. That is absolutely and totally disappointing. In terms of the safeguards, I think it is well documented now that there are no safeguards and that the beef price can actually fall by 9% over five years without any safeguards being implemented. It will cost the farming sector across Ireland up to €130 million. It is time for the Government to get off the fence and either come down with the farmers or come down on the side of Mercosur. It is time-----

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