Trade Agreements
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-19
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Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South

Before I talk about anything I am doing next, the first thing I have to do is to counter what the Deputy just said on the floor of this House. It is complete false. I have been clear on this issue. At a meeting of the Agriculture and Fisheries Council in Brussels on 27 January 2025, when I was four days into the job, I spoke about how I was opposed to the Mercosur trade deal and articulated that perspective very clearly. There were meetings on 24 February 2025 and 24 March 2025. On 23 June 2025, there was a meeting in Luxembourg. There were also meetings on 22 and 23 September 2025 and 17 November 2025 and the extraordinary meeting on 7 January this year as well. That is in addition to the bilateral meetings I had on a number of occasions with my counterpart, Annie Genevard, the French minister for agriculture. I met Francesco Lollobrigida, the Italian minister for agriculture, on a number of occasions to discuss this issue. I also met with ministers of agriculture from Poland, Austria, Cyprus, Latvia, Slovakia, Austria and many other countries that had, for a variety of reasons, expressed concerns. We engaged with them and worked all the way through. We worked to the very last point to get the maximum amount of leverage to see if we could build that bloc. We also pushed on the safeguards. No country would make a final decision that far out if it wanted to keep the maximum pressure on for the safeguards in the event that we failed to have a blocking minority. We crystalised our decisions on the last day and that was absolutely the right strategic approach because we got the 10% down to 5%; we got the changes on the safeguards should we fail to meet the blocking minority . We always knew that we could not do this on our own. Population-wise and member state-wise, we knew that would not be able to make that contribution. It was a very strategic approach.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:45+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-19