Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister and congratulate him and his team of officials on their success, by no means for the first time, in overcoming difficult negotiating hurdles, to all intents and purposes preserving the interests both of the farming sector and, simultaneously, the country at large. I sometimes believe our farm organisations do not always give the Minister credit, to put it mildly, for what he has succeeded in doing. He has immense experience and has essentially been at the negotiating table as Minister, and briefly as Minister of State, for the best part of 16 years. During that period we have managed to get as much out of the negotiations as has been possible.

I will give an illustration of what the Minister is up against. I came across this at random as a member of the Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service. It is a report on a seminar held in Helsinki in February, The New Financial Framework – Challenging EU Road to the Future, detailing how the UK delegation expressed dissatisfaction with the rate of reform of the CAP to date and the need for agriculture to have an ever reducing role within the European Union. One can open The Economist, The Sunday Times and so on. It is not simply reform of the CAP that they want but abolition as soon as possible.

The Minister, with allies in Europe – I suppose the French are leading them – has put up a good battle to prevent agriculture being written out of the equation. The sickening thing about it is that the British Government, when it reaches the negotiating table, wishes to protect the interests of the largest farmers. It is the old adage that socialism is for the rich and capitalism for the poor. One hears Lord Walston crowing about how many million euro he collects each year from the CAP.