Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the Seanad. Like others, I called for this a few weeks ago. I thank the Minister for coming to the House. In this House, as many Senators know, we call for many Ministers to come in but they do not or we cannot find them, or Ministers of State come in from other departments. In fairness to the Minster, he always comes in any time we ask and he takes this seriously. I thank him personally for that. I welcome the members of farming organisations. They are familiar faces who gave a dire outlook on the sector when they met our parliamentary party a few weeks ago. I come from a tillage background, which had bad years in the past. It is good at the moment but I understand when farming can be very tough. For sheep farmers, it is more dire now than for any other sector, to be honest. I often look at this as something related to business rather than just farming. When people who do not understand farming or sheep farming look at it as just farming, they do not see it as a business and what it actually brings to the economy and society. Over the last few years, this Government supported businesses from one crisis to the next, whether that was Brexit, Covid or the cost of living. It has done everything to save as many businesses as possible through schemes brought in in very quick timeframes. For some reason, we seem to be leaving sheep farmers behind, as if they are not a sector that needs to be protected and saved. When I go back to Country Tipperary, it is very simple. People said to me yesterday that there is a €16 billion surplus expected this year and yet we cannot find money to save sheep farmers. We must be realistic. The country is in a pretty good place in terms of tax returns and this is a sector that is really struggling, needs our support and will have a bright future if it receives support from the Government and the department. The sheep farmers I speak to are asking for that support so they can continue with their livelihoods, make them viable and, hopefully, entice a newer generation to come forward.You will never make big money from it but you can have a wonderful lifestyle in sheep farming. We need to give people the opportunity to do it. I know the Minister takes it seriously but I ask that we look at this from an emergency point of view in the same way we have looked at other issues in recent years. We would benefit on the back of it. We must look at the markets we can open up across the world to sell this product. One of the biggest things we need to do is to sell this product as a high quality product, especially in the US. Like everything else at the weekend, how can we give lamb to President Biden in Dublin Castle but we cannot sell it as a high quality product to people in the US? That is what we need to do. That is the future of the sector. It is welcome that we are having the debate. It is good that we are having a serious discussion about it, but it is all for nothing if we do not take it in the serious manner it needs to be taken in, as an emergency situation. We have looked after other sectors before. There is no reason we cannot look after sheep farmers. I ask that it be done quickly.