Bord Bia Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-04 ============================================================ Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South I am delighted to have the opportunity to address this important issue in the Seanad. In the context of Senator’s numerous uses of the phrase "conflict of interest" – I did not keep count – I heard no proof offered. I heard rhetoric. Where is the proof? Has Sinn Féin sought a briefing from the chairperson of Bord Bia? The Senator has sullied someone’s name under privilege in this House but has offered no proof. Her party has tabled a Private Members’ motion that will be debated in the Dáil for two hours this evening. I look forward to debating it. At no point did the Senator explain the point. I will explain a few things about international trade deals. I will explain a number of things about the importance for Irish farmers of the work Bord Bia does in marketing the produce the farmers produce to the highest standard. I will explain about the work that Bord Bia does in having a quality assurance scheme that our farmers have to meet very high standards for. I know that audit system. I have gone through it myself. It is frustrating, laborious and challenging but it means farmers get a bonus payment for their produce - their sheep meat, their beef and their dairy produce. They get that because we export 90% of the food our farmers produce. What happens internationally is hugely important. Everything Senator Collins is talking about is national and relates to Ireland, which makes up just 10%. In general, if you take an Irish food company that does a multimillion euro deal with an international client that is to supply Irish food produce to 40, 50 or 60 countries, including countries in the Middle East and Asia, that may be way beyond Europe, Ireland and the UK. If that deal is worth hundreds of millions of euro and the Irish food company wins that contract and ensures the majority of the meat produce in that contract is Irish produce worth hundreds of millions of euro to Irish farming interests, it is obviously in the interest of Irish farmers that Irish food companies win those contracts. More than price and more than anything, what international clients need, particularly since the pandemic, is guarantees of continuity of supply. They can never afford to have a day they do not have supply. Built into these highly integrated global international deals that Irish food companies are doing regularly is proof that you have spare capacity of five or six weeks at any given time that can be leaned on tomorrow. If you are dependent on a country like Ireland which is producing the majority of the produce, you need proof there is a contingency. If there was any food scare in Ireland or across Europe, you need to have alternative sources of supply so you will not fail to meet your contractual obligations. To take the example of the pork dioxin issue that happened in Ireland back in 2008, every bit of Irish pork had to come off the shelves overnight. Large clients cannot afford to have that happen. What they need an Irish food company, or any other company that wins these contracts, to do is prove it can access supply from somewhere else. Some clients will actually stipulate the countries or the regions. A company and a client might insist that 1% of produce must come from Brazil but that facilitates the use hundreds of millions of euro worth of Irish farmers' produce. It is only 1% to prove the channel is there if all of the supply from Ireland and across Europe was to face a problem because of a food security scare or something like that on very short notice. If this was about price or conflict of interest, it would be way more than 1%. It is purely about proving contingency of supply. That is why farmers benefit from these trade deals. If the Irish food companies did not agree to what the clients wanted in the deals and did not win the contract, and let us say a food company from the Netherlands, Germany or any other country other than Ireland won that contract, does the Senator think those companies would have hundreds of millions of euro worth of Irish farmers' produce in the deal? No, they would not. That is why these deals are of benefit. We need to explain that to our farmers instead of employing rhetoric to whip them up and trying to jump on a bandwagon. We need to explain the integrated nature of international supply deals and how they benefit Irish farmers. The fact that Bord Bia is overseeing year on year record growth in the value of our Irish food and drink exports is testament to the fact that this approach is in Irish farmers' best interests and delivers for their bottom line. --- 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/seanad/2026-02-04/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:35+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-04