Deputy Mary Lou McDonald - speech from 21 Jul 2020

Thank you, Ceann Comhairle. Taoiseach, I want to return to the issue that you tried to brush off as raised by my colleague, Deputy Matt Carthy, and I just want to ask you two questions, if you could confirm for the House that the cap budget is to be cut by 9% in constant prices when compared to the last seven-year multi-annual financial framework. Can you just answer us yes or no? Is it as a matter of fact that there will be a 9% cut by comparison with the last seven-year MFF programme? And secondly, Taoiseach, the Commission's original recovery proposal was for a 15 billion package for rural development. That has now been halved to 7.5 billion. Can you confirm for the House that that is in fact the case? Yes, in relation to the 15 billion, to 7.5 billion, which was in the fund, the recovery fund element and resilience fund, there was two tranches of that during the talks, which were extremely difficult talks. The first would have resulted in a reduction of 124 million for Ireland over seven years. And the second cut of 2.5 billion, which makes it 7.5, would have brought it up somewhere closer to 200 over the seven years. Now, I went back to the President of the Council and made it clear that that wasn't acceptable to us. And we got a special allocation under the MFF of 300 million over the seven years, which will more than adequately cover the proportion of the allocation we would have got from that fund, because obviously it's 27 countries over seven years. So, I think we've dealt with that in terms of the $300 million. Now, in terms of the cap, obviously there will be calculation of figures between current and constant pricing. But I think if you, overall, I think cap has been protected. There will be more flexibilities within CAP. And, no, sorry. Yeah, but I said, I'm not going to go into the detailed calculations now. We will, we, we will discuss, so I know, of course they do all those deals, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to jump into the thing with specific, because I can, yes, and so do we. And look, there was three key elements for us. One was the common agricultural policy, which we've protected. Secondly, getting a special Brexit reserve fund of 5 billion to be used for, but that's very important. Farming. But that's very important to farming, because farming would be one of the, I apologize if you're important. David E. Allen.