Paraic Brady (Fine Gael)

It would be remiss of me not to wish Senator Wilson a happy 80th birthday. He is looking very well for the times.

Today, I rise in response to an article that appeared in the Irish Farmers' Journal this week. To be quite clear, I am not against trade deals. Journalists from the Irish Farmers' Journal went to Brazil, undercover, and visited a lot of towns and villages. They uncovered widespread illegal access to across-the-counter antibiotics. For anyone who does not understand, antibiotics have to be on prescription only in EU countries. To discover that antibiotics are widely available over the counter in the same way as sweets and cigarettes is worrying, especially when we are dealing with food and the food chain. This must call into question the Mercosur trade deal. I would urge our Ministers and MEPs to argue, in the context of the Mercosur deal, that we must have the same traceability standards and stringent rules that apply to food production in all European countries, and especially in Ireland, where we have microchipping, genomics and tagging systems. These rules apply from farm to fork here but now we see that there is a trade deal on the table that will allow beef that can be injected at any stage with an antibiotic that can be bought across the counter, which is very worrying. It is worrying because that beef might actually be on the shelf in Europe at some stage. This is an issue that must be kept on the agenda.