The ratification of the Mercosur trade deal represents the greatest failure of an Irish Government to protect Irish family farmers since we joined the EEC. It is a betrayal of Irish agriculture comparable to what the Common Fisheries Policy was to our fishing community. The roots of this betrayal, which is what it is, go way beyond the last week or so. The roots lie, in the first instance, in an Irish Government agreeing to a negotiating mandate at a European level. They lie in the Lisbon Treaty, which removed the ability of small states like Ireland to protect our interests in trade negotiations. Over the past decades, Sinn Féin has repeatedly called on the Government to stop this deal at times when it could have been stopped. Instead, we got deflection. Fine Gael tried and failed to block a Sinn Féin motion in this House in 2019 mandating it to call “Stop.” We even had Phil Hogan, the then Commissioner, telling Irish farmers at one stage that beef was off the table in the Mercosur talks, which was an attempt to dampen down opposition. In 2017, after I was at a private meeting in the European Parliament when the European Commission confirmed that beef was very much central to this, I called on the Government to stop the deal. Sinn Féin representatives in every single year since have been urging the Government to stop this deal. Rather than heeding those calls, the Government played an absolutely obscene game of duplicity, pretending to farmers that it was opposed to this European trade deal with the Mercosur states, and at the same time doing nothing to bring it to an end. We have had this dismal failure to answer the question that cannot actually be answered: how can you supplant beef, poultry and other products that are produced to the highest standards in the world, and replace them with beef coming from the far end of the world that is being produced at the cost of the rainforests? It says a lot about the Government Members of this House. A former Member of this House, Eamon Ryan, tells us today that we should support this deal, all the while knowing that what they are actually doing, economically, environmentally and from an agriculture perspective, is absolute madness.

Sentiment score: -0.18