John Dolan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Doyle, who I have known for a long time, to the House. I am delighted Senator Boyhan mentioned the Glen of Aherlow. It is a place very close to my heart. I grew up close to it. I remember the first oil crisis in November and December of 1973. We went from 30p for a gallon of petrol to 50p overnight. Schools closed down for longer over Christmas, which was joyful for some of us at the time. It is now unreasonable of us not to consider that the Irish winter is longer and deeper. I hope I am wrong about that, but we cannot plan based on a five-month winter. We have to see it as being closer to seven months. If one does well and gets a shorter winter than that, as the fellow says one then will have money in the bank or some assets for next year.

There is no doubt that the removal of the quota increased the numbers of cattle and livestock in this country. If, in addition to that, winters are extending, as they have been prior to that removal and since, there is less time for cattle to be out on grass. The hallmark of our cattle and horses is that they are out on grass. They cannot be swimming on it, however, it has to be dry. Fodder cannot be cut off it if it is not dry. We have to plan differently. I will bring a military analogy to this. If one does not know when to hold one's ground or when to be more conservative and retreat, one will, to mix metaphors, only plough into trouble. It is hard to have that instinct to pull back, consolidate and take a little bit of a hit when one can bear it and to then recalibrate and move on. There is no doubt but that our winters are getting longer and more difficult.

We have a precious product in agriculture across all the elements of the sector including the area of horse breeding. Central to that, as I have already said, is livestock being able to be outdoors working off grass for as much time as possible. We provide approximately 10% of the world's baby formula. In the bad early days of the recession, Dell went wallop in Limerick and Waterford Crystal went into receivership. Does the Minister of State remember that winter? It was the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. The thing that gave many people hope at that time was that our agriculture and agrifood industry kept going and thrived. Getting the golden egg out of the goose by killing it is not a good plan. We need to hold and preserve what we have. If we have to consolidate a bit, that is what we have to do.

I want to slightly change tack. One could say that agriculture and agrifood is the backbone of rural Ireland. Where I come from in the Golden Vale, small towns such as Tipperary, Fermoy and Mitchelstown are very different from what they were like 100 years ago because agriculture has changed but yet, agriculture and agrifood is still the backbone of rural Ireland. There are more families with disability in rural Ireland than there are farm families. I will give that as an example. There are people who are not in farming but who are small shopkeepers, business people and this, that and the other. There are families trying to survive who are not farming. Many farm families also have a second income. In fact, it is pretty much necessary to have one now.

I want to make one real solid point. We need to not merely read the signals - we have read them - we must do something fairly quickly to get back to sustainability. It is not a mediocre industry. It is what Ministers go out to promote with trade delegations in March and at other times of the year. I was with some friends in Germany two weeks ago. They were proud to show they had Irish butter in their fridge. I just take that for granted but let us not do that. We have something so precious that we need to step back. There was a bit of madness in recent years where stock numbers were ratcheted up. As far as I know, there is not one extra acre of land in Ireland since the quotas went. There is probably less in marginal ways. There is not one extra acre. From the 1970s onward, we had doubled and trebled and done magnificent things with productivity. We do not have too much room on that side any more. It is not like the early 1970s when we went into the EEC, as it was then, when there was plenty of room to improve performance in many different ways.

I will leave it at that. We talk about information and communications technology, ICT, and all these brilliant things but we need to hold onto this thing that is so core to us. We saw this during the bubble. It did not bother us if manufacturing firms around the country went bust because lads and women who worked in them were able to jump up onto diggers on building sites. We need to keep the ordinary, real, indigenous, practical things that people need going. Agriculture is at the core of that.