Pat O'Neill (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Deputy Mairead McGuinness or Ms Mairead McGuinness, MEP. We all see her in the European Parliament as a sheriff on food safety and public health, and I suppose "sheriff" would be something of a promotion.

She dealt well with the horse meat issue. I welcome the legislation on food labelling to come in on 31 December this year. On alternative enterprises, she mentioned getting younger people into farming. When I stayed at home, a farm was able to support two families. Now one needs vast amounts of land if one wants to try to support two families, and that does not happen.

She spoke about alternative enterprises. Interestingly, while coming up today I heard on the radio a lady interviewed on "Today with Pat Kenny" about chicken production in this country. There used be 11 processors; there are now three. It costs ¤7.60 to produce a chicken in Ireland and it costs ¤4.50 in the rest of Europe, especially eastern Europe where energy costs, feed costs and labour costs are much cheaper than ours. How can we compete? I was startled to hear that in Hungary and Ukraine, from which we import 80% of our chicken, they export chicken fillets, which is what we use, through Holland. That comes in as fresh chicken but it could be eight days before it gets to our shelves. We get a chicken from Thailand or Hungary, bacon from Denmark, cheese from Holland and breadcrumbs from the United States, and could call it "Chicken Cordon Blue" when it is made up and labelled as the produce of Ireland. Ms McGuinness stated that the new legislation is applicable to protein produce. As all of those products to which I refer are proteins, under the new legislation in 2013 how can one have a label listing five countries of origin? How will we overcome this?

I noted today that the farming section of the Irish Independent had a headline, "Farmers wary of daughters taking reins". How can we get over that?