Erin McGreehan (Louth, Fianna Fail)

I welcome all the farmers' organisations in the Gallery here this evening. The Mercosur trade agreement is moving very quickly towards a qualified majority vote. That means Ireland cannot rely on an imagined veto. We need clarity, conviction and a firm defence of Irish farmers. Fianna Fáil welcomes this debate but let me be very clear: unless this agreement contains real enforcement protections, Ireland cannot and should not support the Mercosur package. Barry Cowen MEP has done detailed and difficult work on this. He met privately with the DG AGRI officials, who design and enforce the safeguard mechanism. What he brought back matters deeply to the farmers across Louth and the north east and all across the country. The Commission has now confirmed that the 10% threshold is not a hard trigger, that the 7% to 9% rise in imports or fall in prices already counts as a market injury, that provisional safeguards can be imposed in 21 days, that a member state's requests must be answered within five working days and that investigations must conclude within four months, not 12.

These improvements are direct results of Irish pressure, but they do not change the basic reality that 99,000 tonnes of beef quota has real consequences for real farms. In Collon, Ardee, Dunleer, the Cooley Peninsula, Castlebellingham and all across the Boyne Valley, farmers are operating on razor-thin margins and cannot absorb the price collapse driven by lower standard imports. That leads to a central issue of trust. If farmers cannot trust their own Department, they are not going to trust Brussels. The recent handling of the sheep welfare scheme proves that point. Farmers were told they would receive €13 per ewe. They planned around it and they budgeted for it. Then the Department cut it to €11.50. This is not a minor tweak. It is a disgrace. When the State moves the goalposts after farmers have already committed, how can any anyone realistically expect them to have confidence in a European safeguard system affecting their livelihoods? If this is how the Department operates a domestic scheme, why should farmers trust them-----

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