Brendan Ryan (Labour)

In that case, I will take that gentle hint. I am not able to evaluate the Minister's achievements or otherwise precisely but those who pretend – as I heard in some speeches from this side of the House – that there is some way to sustain the status quo indefinitely are fooling themselves. There is no overall electoral advantage in pretending to farmers or urban Ireland that the old way of the Common Agricultural Policy was sustainable. The German taxpayer cannot keep us in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. It is as simple as that, we have to get real. Once, within the last three years, the IFA came to talk to the Joint Committee on European Affairs and in a half hour presentation by the then president, now a Minister of State, the words "consumer" and "market" were never mentioned. I find it astonishing that an organisation which represents producers who wish to sell into the marketplace never mentioned them.