Joe O'Toole (Independent)

This legislation has wrecked the beef industry in small towns all over Ireland. When the Minister and I were young, our mothers or grandmothers would send us to the local butcher to buy a piece of meat for the Sunday roast. The butcher would ask us to tell our mother that the meat came from a farm down the road owned by Brendan Smith who bought the calf from John Carty. While this may be an entertaining point, it is also a serious one. We need to return to those times, albeit not by dropping hygiene or cleanliness standards in abattoirs. If a farmer brings an animal to an abattoir for slaughter, it is pot luck whether the meat returned to him will belong to his animal. People may argue that is completely wrong but the meat comes back wrapped in plastic and it would take a rare genius with the wisdom of Solomon to know whether it had anything to do with the animal delivered to the abattoir.

The Minister should consider the possibility of having State owned abattoirs established in provincial towns to enable local butchers or farmers to rent a chiller and slaughterhouse for a couple of hours a few times each month or week to do their business as they once did. Another approach would be to persuade butchers to organise themselves in local towns but they would never do so.

A serious issue arises in terms of how we do our business. The Minister did not refer to the amount of food that is thrown away, an issue he discussed previously in the House. Food items purchased in supermarkets are labelled with what is known as a "best before" date. I ask the Minister to acknowledge that the use of these dates is a load of nonsense. When the Minister and I were young if one wanted to know whether milk was drinkable, one stuck one's nose into the jug and one knew quickly enough if one could drink it. One did not have to look for a date printed on the bottom of the packaging.

I do not object to "use before" dates, which are completely different, but to best before dates, the reason being that they cause people to throw out and replace perfectly good food, a significant problem which costs money. Not only do consumers throw out food that has past its best before date but supermarkets are also required to remove such products from their shelves. This means the farmer or local stockist is not paid because his product has not been sold. It is completely wrong that the farmer or first producer is forced to pay for this practice.

I compliment the IFA on winning the long-running battle about Brazilian beef. While I do not have a problem with beef from Brazil, I have a problem with Irish farmers trying to compete with it. Although I concur with the Minister on the importance of competitiveness, if Members will forgive the use of a cliché, we also need to have a level playing pitch. I do not propose to dwell on what is being done in Brazil in terms of beef because Irish farmers have made this clear. However, I listened to a documentary on BBC Radio 4 last weekend which highlighted how farming in Brazil is wrecking infrastructure and the Amazon forests. Nobody cares, even though carbon sinks are being developed which cost the world in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Goods produced in Brazil are then exported to this side of the Atlantic where they put our farmers out of business.

I will be clear on this matter to avoid misunderstandings. I ploughed a lone furrow in the 1990s when I fought the Government and IFA because they were trying to con Irish farmers into believing they could secure a price for their beef in excess of the world price in the long term. It took seven or eight years for my argument to be accepted. It is, however, unfair to require European farmers to compete with Brazilian farmers who ride roughshod over the environmental demands imposed on farmers here.

This brings me to the issue of traceability. When I am buying chicken I want to know where it was reared. French supermarkets have adopted a simple approach by placing on all chicken products a label with the words "élevé a", as in "reared in" or "bred in", followed by a location. I want a similar system introduced here. Why does the Minister not simply decide to do so? When his officials tell him how difficult it would be to introduce such a system he should tell them they should sort out the difficulties by the following Monday. He must make this change to ensure that every piece of chicken sold in this country features a label indicating where the chicken was reared. I do not care where it was processed, had water pumped into it or had tandoori spices added to it. I want to know where it was reared.

On another issue, which I have raised previously to the great amusement of my colleagues and on which I feel strongly, we no longer do certain things in this country. For example, it is virtually impossible to find mutton nowadays. One must fight with a butcher to get mutton to make Irish stew. To describe a one year old lamb as mutton is a marketing ploy. If I walk into a house where mutton is being cooked, I will know from its distinctive smell that it is mutton. It tastes and smells different from lamb.