Éamon Ó Cuív: Seeks balance on regulator power and farm ownership

Good evening and good evening and good evening. First of all, I have to say that I listened to Deputy Kearns contribution and obviously she has put a lot of work and detailed work into the bill and I commend her for that. I have to say that, like any bill, I have no doubt it can be improved. I hope, Minister, as the bill goes through the House you will be open to suggestions for building on the basis of the bill to see how it can be improved as it goes along. On the other hand, I think it is time that we actually got ahead and brought in the legislation. I think the second thing that we have to be more adapted in the House generally is that when we bring in legislation, if it is found that there are flaws in it, in every piece of legislation, particularly in new legislation, there are obviously going to be issues that arise fairly rapidly that it should not take ten years to come in with amendments that are necessary in bills. I saw that with the number of bills over the years and it is a terribly bad habit. The third issue that I always have a conflicted view on, or not so much a conflicted view on, but I think that we need a balance. The word independent, we want everything independent. I know where people are coming from, but when people get what they ask for they are often very frustrated also. Because when you say independent, we often mean independent of the Arachtas, of the Minister and of the Arachtas and of the people. Independent of the people? So the relationship between a department and any agency is a very delicate one. And of course we have to recognise, no matter what structures you put in place, humans will always find a way of doing it very well or not doing it so well. And sometimes doing it very badly. But I think it is very, very important that we do not wind up in the farcical situation that I seem to hit against every week. That you ask a question and you are told, well that is the NTA, I have nothing to do with that. That is TII, I have nothing to do with that. That is CRU, I have nothing to do with that. I was asked a simple question today. Was it intended, like we did with the rural broadband, to put water into every house in Ireland? Just pipe water rather than people depending on wells. About 10 per cent of houses need pipe water. I have told that that is the matter for CRU. It is not, it is the matter for the Arachtas. So I think it is important that the right balance is struck between the Minister and the powers, and the right of the regulator to get on with the job and do it efficiently. As I said, I think that has to be debated in detail, but it has to be a balanced debate. I remember writing into it, now it is not analogous because it is not a regulator, but in the Eudoros bill, I obviously could not tell them to put a factory in a particular spot, but I could say I wanted certain industrial policies pursued in the Guelphs, and I did. For example, the most indigenous resource in the Guelphs was the language, and therefore I instructed that 30 per cent of the funding was to go to language-based industries. But I could not say where or the detail of it. So I had it written in the Act that I could give any general instruction I wanted, and I would be answerable to the House if I abused that at the time. So I do think that this issue of not putting it so far away from the Arachtas that the people do not have any say in it any more is something that we need to get right. Now, I am really, really welcome to this bill. I first suggested this back in 2014, when I was spokesperson in agriculture for Fiona Foyle. I was looking at this very vexed question, and the Agriculture Committee at the time did a lot of work on this, because I had raised it in the Agriculture Committee, as to where the villains were. There are major issues in the supply chain, in terms of pricing and so on, and cartels and all sorts of arrangements. But was it the big multiples, were they really dictating the price, or was it the processors and so on? I visited the European Union at the time a number of times, and we did a lot of research, and there was good help given to me at the time. It became clear that, for example, the French were well ahead of us in at least analysing what the problem was, because you cannot solve any problem if you do not know where to get the information. It became obvious that they were well ahead in legislative terms in getting this information and forcing the information. The second thing is that it can have quite a chastening effect on people if they know you are watching them. It is like the CCTV camera. If they know you are watching them, it can have quite a good effect. So I do welcome this bill. It is very, very late coming, but I do hope that it does have an effect. I would just like to join with Deputy Harley-Cardins in relation to the issue of the big boats. It is a scandal the way the fishing industry is organised. What we are doing in our society generally right across the board is corporatising everything, ownership of houses, ownership of boats, now ownership of land for forestry. We are corporatising our society very fast. I do not know where the influence is. Is it the European influence or whatever, but I am still old fashioned enough to believe that if you want a stable society, diffuse ownership, i.e. that as many people as possible own something, is the way to stability and social and economic stability in your society. It might not give you the exponential growth, but it will give you a much more important thing in any human society, and that is stability. Therefore, I think it is important that as part of this there is a clear philosophy that what we want to do is keep the basic structures of Irish farming viable. We want to have a diffuse ownership of land rather than a few corporates, slowly but surely, beginning to hold more and more huge tracts of land. As I said in the Dáil yesterday, we took a long time to break that down. We do not want to go back to where we started. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.