Francie Gorman

Well, I'm always amused, David, when non-farming people start telling farmers what's good for them.

We represent our members.

That's our job, to lobby on their behalf.

The EU membership of the European Union has been good for Ireland, but we are entering a phase now where we're going from what was a very protected market to a very open market.

And we always seem to have agriculture as a bargaining chip in all these trade deals.

And our concerns about it are, number one, the standards that are applied to production in South America that we have to compete with, the damage that that's going to do to the market.

You cannot bring product into a market without undermining it in some shape or form.

And that's acknowledged.

And the process around how this deal was ratified, and now the fact that the European Parliament has been ignored, it's gone to the European Court of Justice, and the Commission seemed to be hell-bent on driving on and ignoring the democratic processes in Europe.

And the idea that there's going to be huge benefits for Irish agriculture in this, that doesn't stack up.

Potentially.

Very, very, very, very minimal benefits for the dairy sector, but they will be absolutely wiped out by the damage that's done to the beef sector.

And remember, David, you don't have a dairy sector if you don't have a beef sector.

We have every dairy calf, every cow that produces milk eventually finishes up in the beef sector.

And we have farmers whose markets and our prices

are already been undermined by trade deals that have been done with Europe, by Europe and by the English.

And we've seen that play out in the marketplace over the last five or six months where farmers who have purchased cattle in the autumn for finishing now see themselves suffering heavy losses because our prices have been undermined by imports into the UK in particular.

Firstly, a couple of points.

The absolute facts are that we have to complete with beef that's produced at different standards to us.

Two years ago, we had hormone beef come into the European Union and we were told that the checks and balances were in place and that this wouldn't happen again.