Noel Grealish (Galway West, Independent)

I will soon finish up. The Minister had a good trade mission, which is important. The Secretary of Agriculture in the United States has very strong Galway connections and I was delighted to see the Minister present a Galway jersey to her when he met her in Washington. I am hoping she will make a visit to Ireland fairly soon. The Minister was in Japan and Seoul. That was a very successful trip. It was tough going. The mission was arranged when he was in the role I am in so it was important he went and headed it up. To go abroad to try to sell Irish produce is not hard and a lot of that is down to the farmers, the processors and to the Department, its officials and the excellent work they have done. I compliment Bord Bia. I was very impressed when I was at Bloom to see the amount of small companies there. Agriculture is in every single town and village in this country. It has some sort of impact on every town and village from the money that is raised on farms. There was a little company in a small rural town in Galway that employs 15 people. If that was in the middle of Dublin, it would be 300 or 400 people. Fifteen people in a small rural town is a lot. That is what we need to work on more.

The BIA Innovator Campus in Athenry is a huge success. At Moorepark in Cork the big companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola are in there doing their research in these facilities. They use Ireland. That has a lot to do with the investment put in by all previous governments. It is about what they have done, what they have seen and the vision they have for agriculture. As the Secretary General said, let us make and keep agriculture a good news story. It is a good news story. It employs 160,000 to 170,000 people. There are 2,000 fishing vessels. I am not sure, but I think there 133,000 farmers in the country.

I am delighted to come in here, and I thank Senators most sincerely for the invitation. I am not sure whether I covered what everybody said. With Mercosur, it is in the programme for Government. We do not agree with it as it is and it is an issue we are going to continue to work on. The Minister is working with his colleagues across Europe on this.

The Minister is doing a lot of work on the CAP. We had a lot of meetings within the Department. Another good news story came from the Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, whom I was talking to yesterday. We are now exporting timber to China, which is hard to believe. It is going into containers. There are 14,000 tonnes of timber being exported to China and a lot of that timber was damaged by Storm Éowyn. It is amazing. He told us there is this special smoke thing that is put into the container that is lit before you seal it. When it gets to the far side it kills all the bugs that could be on the timber. We are, therefore, progressing and making great inroads.

The Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, has responsibility for fisheries, as Senators know. He is going to another EU meeting soon. Fisheries is tough, but the SPS agreement with the United Kingdom is crucially important for our trade with the UK. It is our biggest trading country in all aspects, not just farming. It is important we have that SPS agreement because it cuts out an awful lot of the paperwork.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh. Tá an-áthas orm a bheith anseo ar an lá seo. I hope I have covered as much as I can.