Results 8,781-8,800 of 40,897 for speaker:Simon Coveney

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: That is for all intents and purposes pure horsemeat.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: Not that I am aware of, apart from the fact that he was supplying product to Silvercrest. Last Friday, the FSAI, along with a local authority vet, entered that specific trader's premises and office and acquired all of his files and computer disks so he is very much part of the investigation. I understand he has been named in the media but that is not as a result of anything we have said....

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: I consistently said as late as last night that I am not condemning all Polish food and putting a question mark over it. Much of the food imported from Poland into Ireland is of very high quality and comes from certified plant. We have a very large Polish population in Ireland and many members of it import food. Other food companies import product from Poland in the same way as they do from...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: Let me be straight with Deputy Pringle. I cannot give him the detailed answer he wants because there are ongoing discussions which we hope will be helpful in securing the jobs at Silvercrest. They are commercially sensitive at this point. If contracts are to be rebuilt to allow the infrastructure at Silvercrest to be providing large volumes of burgers to clients, something fundamental...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: A question was asked about beef trimmings. Essentially, they are the bits and pieces of the carcass that remain when the prime cuts are removed. It is basically the cheap meat that does not have a market of itself. From what I have seen in the cold storage facilities in factories such as the plant in question, beef product is pushed together and then traded as an ice block of product. One...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: Yes, some of them probably would. If a butcher is deboning in his or her butchery, he or she will have leftover meats. This stuff is not necessarily bad for people. In the case of soups, sauces, chicken stocks and so on, one is eating material which has been either flavoured by or involves a good deal of the product in question. It may not look particularly nice or we might not like the...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: I am unsure how long the management at Silvercrest Foods has been in place. I imagine the management system has changed and evolved over time. Clearly the management in recent times has not been supplying to its customers what it should have been supplying under contract, and that is what I mean by bad practice. It is not necessarily a breach of the law but it has resulted in Tesco and...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: It will continue for as long as it takes. For obvious reasons, we have put the team under pressure to get results as quickly as it can, but I am not going to rush it regardless of what people may say. Similarly, we have not rushed the Silvercrest investigation. I suspect legal cases and litigation over compensation will be pursued at the end of this process. Before we establish the facts...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: I do not know whether that has happened in the past year, but I understand plants have been told to suspend production and have lost certification for certain types of production at different times. I will have to revert to the Deputy regarding the last 12 months because I do not have the figures.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: With all due respect, we cannot instruct Poland to do anything. It is a separate country and it makes its own decisions.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: I will take those questions in reverse order. As regards labelling, if a product is a pure meat product, it must have country of origin labelling wherever it goes and there must be full traceability right back to the farmyard. Ireland has better traceability than any other country of which I am aware in terms of its systems and how they work. The problem arises with processed food. When...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: I am not aware of any such reports. I am not aware that any breaches of the law, or of food safety standards, were uncovered at Silvercrest. That is really what we were there to look at.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: Obviously, we have sifted through all of the paper and computer records to see if there is any evidence to suggest that horsemeat could have been knowingly imported. There is no evidence to suggest that. If such evidence emerges in time, it will be a very serious issue. There is no evidence to date to suggest that is the case.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: I will answer Senator O'Neill's questions first. With regard to whether we will be looking for co-operation from the Polish authorities if there is a police investigation that spans a number of different countries, to be honest, it is too early to give an answer to that. What I hope will happen is that either we will send a team to Poland to talk through all of our findings, or they will...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: No, I am not. I am just saying that, in this investigation, it is no excuse for what happened.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: We are here to talk about the investigation. On the broader issue, there has been a growing problem in the past ten years. If one looks at what food producers get from the end price in the supermarket of product sold at retail level, ten years ago they would have got more than 30% of that price, whereas they now get less than 20%. That is not a trend that is sustainable into the future....

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: They should not be supplying them if they cannot provide them with the guarantees that are needed from a safety and contractual point of view. That is the marketplace; that is how it works. I am not comfortable with the fact that producers are under pressure - at times, huge pressure - to supply product at very tight margins but we cannot use that as an excuse for what has happened here.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: All of Deputy Ó Cuív's comments were directed at Professor Reilly so I will let him get his thoughts together and I will deal with Deputy Heydon's questions. We are all very familiar with the inspection system and the system of traceability for farmers. In respect of how that compares with the risk assessment and inspections we have in factories, the truth is that there are many...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: The figures are actually much higher than that. I can supply them to the Deputy.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine: Burger Content Investigations: Discussion (5 Feb 2013)

Simon Coveney: Stephen Philpott, who heads up the Ulster Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, USPCA, has expressed serious concerns about the trade in horsemeat. I recently heard him speaking about this on radio. The following morning I got someone from the Department to telephone him directly. There have been two, if not more, meetings since then between him, someone from my office and the...