I thank Deputy Durkan for the question. As he knows well and would agree with me, the agrifood sector is our most important indigenous exporting sector, playing a vital role in our economy. It accounts for 6.7% of modified gross national income, employing some 165,000 people or 7% in total of the workforce. The sector has ambitions to increase the value of agrifood exports further now and in the time ahead. However, to achieve this ambitious export target, we will need to ensure that the path forward is built aroun…

I welcome the opportunity to contribute on the 2024 agriculture, food and marine budget introduced by me and my colleagues, the Ministers of State, Senator Hackett and Deputy Heydon. My goal for budget 2024 was to support our farm and fishing families. This has been achieved with vital livestock schemes secured, environmental schemes bolstered in funding, new infrastructure measures introduced to support farmers impacted by the changes to the nitrates derogation and support provided for the development of our fishi…

I thank the Deputy for raising the issue of the availability of these significant supports for on-farm investment. It is of importance for farmers throughout the country, particularly in his constituency. The Government and I, as Minister, are committed to delivering on this. The new TAMS 3 commenced in February with the launch of the solar capital investment scheme and then opened up for different items all the way up to when it closed at the end of June. Overall, €370 million is profiled between now and 2027 for …

We are trying to sequence this. It cannot all be done in one go. It should be borne in mind that it opened up through a number of months and only closed on 1 July. A record number of applications were made and we have to work through them in the most efficient way possible. We have given authorisation to half of all applicants to go ahead and make their purchase. That relates to the mobile TAMS. In addition, we have pulled out the urgent applications relating to work that needs to be done this autumn. Such applican…

Deputy McNamara will know that for the first time in the history of the State we have had a statutory office in place to bring more transparency to the food supply chain, with the objective of making sure the massive hard work that our farm families do is rewarded in the price they get. Some 90% of the food we produce is exported. Our highest value markets are the EU and the UK, in particular. The office means it is open to everyone, including the Deputy, to make submissions in relation to issues the regulator can …

I am telling the Deputy that the office is in place and it is very much open to him to make a submission requesting the regulator to look at any particular issue. We are currently in the process of appointing the board which will oversee the work of the regulator and which will be able to feed into decision around particular issues to look at.

It is not news to me at all. I know the Deputy likes dramatics on the floor of the Dáil. I am encouraging him to put a question to the regulator.

I thank the Deputy for his question. This is an important issue, so we must ensure that everyone works together in progressing future offshore opportunities and that all considerations are taken into account. Commercial sea fishing and aquaculture activities are long-standing, pre-existing and traditional activities in the marine environment. The Deputy will agree that our seafood resources are an important national economic asset that generate a great benefit to the economy of €1.3 billion every year, with approxi…

I am happy to meet them further. I regularly meet the inshore fisheries forum. I would encourage our inshore fishers to become organised through the regional and national forums. Their voice has not been represented properly in our fisheries’ representative infrastructure. This has been a major weakness and has meant that, in many cases, they have not had fair representation or a fair deal. I have worked to ensure that is corrected. I know the Deputy supports me strongly in that regard. I have discussed this matter…

To be clear, officials in my Department have worked consistently to ensure the voice of fishers is heard across the Government, which is where the challenge lies. It is always heard within the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, but some of these issues are led by other Departments. Like fishers, my Department’s officials have always sought to ensure that engagement exists. There is a constant push, as one must make one’s voice heard constantly. I am raising this matter at Cabinet level all of the time …

I thank the Deputy for her question. Milk is a sustainable, safe and very nutritious food product and we are among the best in the world in how we produce and deliver it. Whenever I listen to nutritionists on television or radio, they advocate for the nutritional benefits of milk as a food. As such, it is important that milk and all the dairy products that come from it are produced. Thankfully, we in this country do that in a way that is better than anywhere else in the world. Our farm families across the country d…

I agree with the Deputy about the scenes we saw on "RTÉ Investigates" on Monday night. They were absolutely unacceptable and totally intolerable. I have launched an investigation and it will be robustly followed up. We cannot have any corner of our agrifood sector in which those types of practices happen. They are certainly not representative of what happens on farms across the country or in our food sector. However, they happened. They cannot be allowed to happen and we are investigating that. There are lots of ad…

I dispute the Deputy's last point entirely. There can be no place for the type of behaviour we saw on "RTÉ Investigates". I will not tolerate that as the Minister responsible for agriculture, nor indeed will anyone in the sector with responsibility. We will clamp down on it in every way we possibly can. The Deputy made a point about emissions. There is no doubt we saw an increase in our dairy herd after the removal of quotas in 2015 and that led to an increase in emissions. That increase happened because the herd h…

I thank the Deputy. I take it he is referring to the mid-term review of the European Union's 2021-2027 MFF, as it is the financial framework that sets the funding allocations across the various headings of the EU budget, including the Common Agricultural Policy. Last month the Commission published its proposals for a limited and targeted revision of the 2021-2027 MFF, which is the overall budget for all European Union spending. Ireland's response to the proposed targeted review is led by the Departments of Foreign …

The mid-term review is not a capital review; it is a review across the EU budget and it is quite narrow in relation to the items it identifies. We fought hard at the start, when the multi-annual financial framework was negotiated and published, to make sure we could push it to be as high as it could possibly be. We were one of the countries pushing for a higher CAP budget. There was lots of downward pressure on it and we were advocating and pushing to try to get it higher. There is no doubt there has been pressure …

-----which is the highest it has ever been between CAP programmes.

The original proposal, when the multi-annual financial framework was being negotiated at European level a couple of years ago, was for a cut in CAP. As Taoiseach at the time, Deputy Micheál Martin, pushed back massively, because of the importance of agriculture in our country. It is not the same in other countries in Europe, but it is for us. We were one of the countries to the forefront in pushing that back to seek to get the CAP budget maintained. That was a massive fight and a massive battle and it went to the v…

That is what this Government's commitment is.

Deputy Berry's question is quite a topical one. It is one that is coming up quite a bit at the moment and getting a lot of discussion as well. He is right that it was covered in the Irish Farmers' Journal last week and it has been raised at many of the meetings I have been having with farm organisations in recent weeks too. I want to be clear that no decision has been taken by the Government to proceed with such a scheme. There has been no such Government decision, and no Exchequer funding provision is currently in…

I think Deputy Berry explains it very well. As Minister, it has been my approach, and it will continue to be my approach, to work with farmers with whom we share this challenge. We all have to work together to meet the challenge. We are doing that and that will continue. On the suckler and the beef sectors, farm organisations were adamant that there should be no scheme for them, so I said: "Grand, there will be none." Most of the calls and queries I got after that were from suckler farmers wondering why there is no…