Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

President Bolsonaro is a climate change denier and is up to his neck with the ranchers and people who are destroying the rainforest whom he funds and backs. He has made no secret of the fact that this is his agenda.

Farmers in Donegal and any other county in this State live up to very onerous environmental legislation and regulations and inspectors check farms of all sizes. Farmers rely on the cheque to arrive and always worry about inspections. Farm planners try to make farmers live up to the standards that we are all proud of in the beef sector but the work is tough. We talk to young people to get green flags displayed at their schools. We also talk about climate change being the challenge of our generation and acknowledge there is a crisis.These Houses accept that it is a climate crisis. The proposed Commissioner, the Irishman Phil Hogan, says with a serious face that this is a fair and balanced deal. It is an absolute scandal. It is an insult to all the people working in our beef sector who try to live up to the standards we are told are absolutely necessary because of the climate crisis we face; and now we are proposing a deal with Bolsonaro and telling people not to worry because he will sign up to the Paris Protocols and transform overnight from a climate change denier to a Green Party candidate in the next presidential election in Brazil. That is utter nonsense. We know that this deal is really about the people who inhabit the corridors of Brussels: the lobbyists for big business. This is about major corporations and industries getting access to the South American markets to privatise their resources and drive down workers' rights. We can be sure that that is what this deal is all about.

Back in the day, it was said that we sold out the fishing communities.