Mattie McGrath warns regulators failing farmers, backs motion

I want to compliment the Social Democrats on this very, very important motion, but I don't know if it's going to fall in the fields. I feel it well. Like so many other motions like this before. I remember when Deputy Healy Ray's brother, now Minister of St. Michael, and I went across with the IFA to some supernacty in Dublin, with a small number of IFA activists and worried from the vegetable and fruit and supporters, and saw three trollies were filled up to water level, and they didn't cost €20 each. That was unsustainable then. It's more unsustainable now that food can be priced for that. Coming from a mixed farm that grew everything, and still do, my brother grows a lot of potatoes, and indeed every kind of mixture you could have, and to tell Deputy Healy Ray, just lovely to see the colours in the corn, the combines have been working since last Thursday in South Tipperary, and I visited some of them. It's wonderful to see the harvest, and the weather, thanks be to God, is so wonderful. But the farmers are being, you know, intimidated. They're being killed every which way, and the costs of everything else go inputs, and the price going down, you name it, whatever it is. This year in fairness, cattle and sheep, and the pig meat are doing very well, but that's going to have its own implication. But food security going forward isn't very much threatened, and solar farms, and they're taking over. The best of land in South Tipperary, but can I say as far as the regulators, and all the regulators, and when I came in here 18 years ago, we had a limited number of regulators, but they're like mushrooms now in a field of a soft wet morning. They have mushrooms everywhere. There's a regulator for everything, and the vast majority of them are useless, toothless, and fruitless. Okay, yes, they have their office, they have the title, they have their plaque on the wall, they have their fancy office desk, and they have a team of employees paid for by the taxpayers. It's the same with the NGOs, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, and the people, the public, in this case the farmers, are being milked high and dry, pardon the expression. And the regulators, as I said, are toothless, useless, and fruitless. It's so sad. We have the regulators, they have powers, but they're ineffective, totally ineffective, and governments are feeble and inept at insisting and instructing the regulators to do their job. Do what the taxpayers' money have there, and taxpayers' money is paying for them to do, they're not doing it. Across the whole area, insurance, we hear it again at the moment, and we had different moves and different things taken that would bring down the price of insurance, but no. But on the food sector, it's so important that the family, and for nutrition, as Deputy Gillian Toole said, that we have good and proper fresh. There's nothing like a fresh carrot for fresh predators or turnips or cabbage out of the fields, and clay on them, nothing like it. But now it's imported from all over the world, and I see worries at the moment about some fruits being imported from Israel. So support our farmers, but above all, insist that the regulations and the regulators that are applied to do their job, do their job. I talked about the Custom House last night here with what's gone wrong with us here in this republic, that the people are paid to do jobs, paid handsomely, and they're not doing it. Because we're all in hock to the big condombers. The governments are in fear of them, probably in hock to them, and everybody else as well. Big is wonderful. We know the price and the cost when all the small producers are gone, and they are going like a snow off a ditch. They're disappearing, because it's not viable, and they can't survive. I support the motion, and I appeal to the Minister to do their job.