IRISH BEEF FARMERS AND GERMAN SUPERMARKETS

If you ever wondered why the two giant German supermarkets, can sell their produce so cheaply and undercut their Irish and British supermarket competitors, you will have discovered the answer on the News today which reported that Irish beef farmers were picketing a German retail facility because the supermarket does not pay its Irish suppliers on time and, in particular, because it does not pay Irish beef farmers who supply it with beef and beef products a fair market rate for their produce, and in some cases, the supermarket does not pay them at all. There are many ways of describing this disgraceful practice which is allegedly followed, pursued and applied by the supermarket, but the Law would call it, designate it and castigate it as fraud, theft or grand Larceny, most of us would simply categorize it as common theft! Minister Creed, the Minister for Agriculture. has inscribed this practice (common theft, though he doesn’t call it such) as one of the issues which is to be discussed by his newly-established Beef Task Force. There isn’t much to discuss really. Irish farmers, including Beef Farmers, work extremely hard, for extremely long hours, in all kinds of weather the whole year around and they produce a quality beef product that is admired and envied the whole World over! Irish beef farmers merely want and wish, as is their correct constitutional, contractual, legal and property right, to be paid a fair market price for their beef and beef products which truly, fairly and accurately reflects their investment, their labour and the quality of the beef and the meat which they produce. In particular, Irish beef farmers cannot see, understand or accept the sad unfair reality that beef farmers in the United Kingdom and beef farmers throughout the rest of the European Union are being paid a lot more money than they are at present for beef and beef products which are clearly, evidently and manifestly of inferior quality. Part of the explanation for this sorry and unacceptable state of affairs lies in the parasitical profit-making and entirely selfish tax-dodging role which the Beef Barons play at the cattle-markets and at the gates of the so-called abattoirs, meat factories or slaughter-houses. A more fundamental, profound and enduring explanation is the manipulation exerted and exercised by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on agricultural and meat prices, including beef prices, throughout Europe and, consequently, throughout much of the World. The CAP is a crude inflexible pricing system designed to ensure and guarantee that the same price is paid to all farmers for their produce throughout the whole of the European Union. Should the price for any particular agricultural produce or farming product fall below a certain level, then the Commission will intervene to artificially support the price of that agricultural produce or farming product by buying up huge quantities of the agricultural produce or farming product, deep-freezing them and storing them in “intervention”. The problem with buying and storing into intervention is that not only is the Common Agricultural Policy hugely wasteful and expensive, but that the CAP treats all the very many different kinds of agricultural produce and meat farming products which Europe produces as if they were exactly and precisely one and the same thing. In particular, where the biggest problem besetting Irish agriculture is concerned, namely the price of beef farming and beef products is concerned, the practice of setting prices or fixing prices in line with the price set by the Commission in Brussels for buying into intervention means that the prices which Irish farmers get for their very superior beef and beef products is set by aligning and comparing the prices which the Irish beef farmers get for their beef and beef products with the prices which the Commission sets for buying and selling beef and beef products into intervention, which are by definition beef and beef products of a much lesser and inferior quality. Garret the Good, may God be good to him, was a very committed European and he naively believed that under the Treaties the Commission had been established to protect, defend and uphold the interests of the smaller EU States, in fact the very opposite is the case, the Treaties established the Commission in order to protect, defend and uphold the political, economic, diplomatic and military interests of the larger EU States, in particular where Agriculture is concerned the political and economic interests of France and, in just about every other respect and sphere of EU activity, the political, economic, diplomatic and military interests of Germany. Matters were made much worse for Ireland when Bertie and Michael Martin, with the disgraceful and supine acquiescence of the Irish Supreme Court, falsified the outcome of the sovereign referendums on the Treaty of Nice and the Treaty of Lisbon, both of which had been rejected by the Irish people in two referendums. The far-reaching consequence and result of this treasonable perjury, forgery, sleight of hand and constitutional subterfuge, was that thanks to the introduction of the illegal concept and practice of Qualified Majority Voting at the European Council the power of the larger Member States, Germany, France and the Commission increased greatly and the power and ability of Ireland to defend, protect and uphold a vital national interest effectively disappeared. The proof of this proposition is that Minister Creed, the Minister for Agriculture, was never consulted at any stage during the Commission’s trade negotiations with Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Despite disclaimers to the contrary after the event, the negotiators from the Commission sold Irish agriculture and beef farming down the drain while flagrantly and blatantly looking after and favoring the interests of the very large, very wealthy German luxury motorcar manufacturers. Even more dramatically, the Commission, thanks to the incompetence and total ineptitude of Deputy Premier Foreign Minister Simon, who refused to nominate and appoint any Irish negotiators for the first phase of the negotiations on the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union is now proposing to proceed without any Irish input whatever, without consulting Ireland at all or even without keeping Ireland informed of developments, in the EU-UK Political and Trade negotiations which will begin shortly as soon as Britain leaves the European Union.

Maurice James, Barrister at Law, United Nations Counsel