Cabinet Committees Dail Éireann — 2026-01-13 ============================================================ Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central Everyone is trying to gain ground. I am very focused and clear-eyed in terms of protecting Irish farmers across all the suite of issues we have to deal with over the next 12 months. The most important one will be income to farmers because income matters in terms of the multi-annual financial framework and how much we can ring-fence for the Common Agricultural Policy for the next seven years after 2027. That is vital for Irish farmers. It is something we will continue to work on. Obviously, the European Parliament will make its decision in respect of that. Deputy Pádraig O'Sullivan raised the issue of the Presidency on two fronts, including the area of key policy. On competitiveness, the expansion of the Single Market, savings and investment union and enlargement, I would like to see progressive steps on enlargement whereby we would at least be in a position to close out the negotiations on Montenegro, for example. That is a real prospect and we have given a commitment to trying to advance this during our Presidency. The Council took a decision in December that it wanted to conclude the multi-annual financial framework by the end of this year. That means the Irish Presidency will have to conclude it. Impossible demands in terms of the availability of funding and so on will have to be resolved. Values, as have been discussed here, will be a key objective. There will be quite a number of informal Ministerial Council meetings in Ireland and other conferences. About 25% of the ministerial meetings will be outside Dublin, and clarity will be provided on the specific meetings that will be held across the country in respect of the Presidency. I note the Deputy's ongoing consistent interest in and advocacy in terms of rare diseases and orphan drugs. I hope the Minister will be able to bring to the Government shortly an agreement after the negotiations with the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association in respect of our domestic allocation of funding for medicines this year. I took an interest in that also given the Deputy's advocacy on the issue. It is a very important issue for many groupings and people with rare conditions who need more urgent responses. It is challenging and an area of increasing focus. The cost implications are enormous. Hopefully, the agreement we hope to conclude and bring to the Government shortly will deal with a lot of this in terms of our domestic capacities. That covers most of the areas we will be covering during the Presidency. There will be others. Deputy Boyd Barrett referred to President Trump and Iran. Again, Iran has been a very malign actor. I take the Deputy's point that he has no truck with the Iranian regime because it has persecuted its civilians for a long time. Long before Mr. Trump became the US President, people from different political backgrounds always argued about interventions. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-13/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-13