Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. As previous speakers stated, he has the unanimous support of the House in dealing with this form of criminality. Senator Jim D'Arcy has been the Minister of State's ally on this issue at all times and has represented his interests in this matter very well in the Seanad.

He will not let this issue be long-fingered. It has been going on for a long time. A total of 157 tonnes were found in County Louth in 2005, rising to 868 tonnes in 2011. I worry about the marker as a solution because if criminals can remove the existing marker, they will be able to remove the new marker. I do not know what time advantage will be gained. The criminals will have their own scientists and technologists and so on.

Looking at this from a different perspective, and Senator Quinn had some interesting thoughts on the issue, there has never been a tax that people will not try to avoid. There has never been a subset of people who will not try to qualify for exemptions. This could be rule No.1 in the Department of Finance and should be pinned up on the wall there. This is an agricultural subsidy, as I understand it, which people are seeking to drain off into other areas. Is there a possibility, as hinted at by Senator Quinn, that we could subsidise agriculture directly? This might be the time for a discussion of this issue, given the levels of criminality referred to by my colleagues here. There is an extremely good relationship between the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Coveney, who was in this House last week to discuss the fodder crisis and how his Department has gotten to grips with it, and the farming sector. In that context, could we change to a different way of assisting farmers which would not involve the loss of income on anyone's part, as Senator Moran stressed? At the moment, this form of assisting agriculture is leading to horrible criminality. Even if it was not criminal, it is promoting the use of a product, by lowering the price, which product is in scarce supply anyway. This should be an era of energy efficiency but the criminality dwarfs that.

When the legislation to provide the exemption was originally brought through the Houses, the intention was not to promote criminality or to reward farmers with a subsidy which encouraged them to use more fuel rather than less. How do we help farmers, especially those on low incomes, without reducing their incomes? Direct payments or income supplements, weighted towards low-income farmers could be the way to go. If there are diesel tax rebates for millionaire farmers, that does not particularly concern me at the moment. This is a serious problem and I join the Minister of State in commending the PSNI, the Garda Síochána and both sets of customs officers who have to deal with this problem. Did we create this criminality by a badly designed scheme to subsidise agriculture? While we do not want to deprive farmers of anything, we need to use the combined intelligence of the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the Department of Finance to change the system so that farmers are not worse off but the criminals are substantially so.