Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)

I thank Senator Casey for allowing me to share time, as time is limited and I was not going to get an opportunity. I thank the Minister of State for being here today. While I will not disclose his age - I do not know it down to a fine art but I have a fair idea - I know he has never lived in an Ireland that was not in the EEC or EU. I, on the other hand, was eight when Jack Lynch led us into the EEC. I am the eldest of seven who were reared and educated and never wanted for anything on a very small farm with a lot of marginal land. My father and mother would not have been able to successfully do that or provide for us as they did if it had not been for the vision of the Government that led us into the EEC. Money became available to develop smallholdings and drain land and there were subsidies as part of the CAP. That is in a nutshell what it meant to the people of Ireland. The Ireland of today is a changed place because of our membership of the EEC then and the EU now. We need to keep focus on where we came from. Let it be a different EU, a different Ireland and a different island but we cannot lose focus on where we came from and how we got to where we are.

I want to talk about the CAP. Europe has changed. The emphasis, as we are all aware, is on the environment, defence and immigration, and now we are in a trade war. CAP was designed to provide cheap, traceable, quality food for our citizens. The money allocated to the CAP in the multi-annual financial framework, MFF, needs to remain the same. We cannot rob that fund to fund our defence, environmental issues or immigration problems, or indeed the trade war we are in, for want of a better term. We need to stay focused on that.

I have to comment on Mercosur, which gets so many mentions. Nobody in these Houses will defend Irish farming and agriculture more than me, as a farmer myself, but I am not opposed to Mercosur. I am opposed to elements of it. We need to get a good deal for our farmers in Mercosur. People stand up and oppose Mercosur but how can a country with an open market dependent on trade agreements oppose a trade deal at a time when the President of America is introducing tariffs? Never before were trade deals so important. We have to get the right Mercosur but we cannot knock it. During Brexit, when we were isolated, we went cap in hand to all the other members of the EU and they did not let us down. Trade in many of those countries depends on the Mercosur deal so why should we turn our backs on them? We have to insist on environmental and food safety transparency and that beef does not come into our country and our markets that is not of the same quality as our own, but we cannot say we oppose the trade deal in its entirety.