Parnell Summer School: A Fianna Fáil TD has called on the Government to abandon its support for the current EU farm subsidy system because of the damage being caused to developing countries.
Mr Barry Andrews, a TD for Dún Laoghaire, said that Ireland had "no credibility" internationally in promoting the development agenda because of its reliance on augmenting the income of Irish farmers through grants.
He said any attempt to promote development issues during the EU presidency faced a "credibility problem" as a result, despite Ireland's reputation for supporting development work.
"We should be adopting a more mature and coherent attitude to it," Mr Andrews told the Parnell Summer School yesterday. He said developed countries such as Ireland had their "foot on the throats of development" because of farm subsidies.
"What we have to look for is a way of getting the subsidies removed." He said that direct payments to farmers in Ireland "have increased by 18.7 per cent, and now represent 69 per cent of farm incomes, and half of the European Union's budget". "Clearly that is not a sustainable situation," he said. According to Mr Andrews, the subsidy system in Europe was hugely damaging to developing economies that are highly dependent on food exports for income.
"The reliance on subsidies [in western economies) is exactly what's preventing farming from growing in the Third World." He advocated the use of the World Trade Organisation, which is meeting next month, as the forum to further the removal of subsidies. Mr Andrews also defended his support of the Government's decision to allow US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon Airport, despite his concerns about the morality of the war.
He believed that precedent, where US military planes had been allowed to use Shannon on an ongoing basis since the 1960s, overrode moral questions about the conflict. However, Mr Richard Boyd Barrett, a socialist worker and head of the Irish Anti-War movement, claimed that Ireland had "prostituted itself" to the Bush administration, whose main purpose was to further the interests of US companies abroad.
Former Fine Gael TD, Mr Alan Dukes, clashed with Mr Boyd Barrett, who targeted capitalism and foreign multinationals as one of the root causes of instability and poverty in developing nations.
Mr Boyd Barrett was telling "fairy stories" according to Mr Dukes, who said widespread corruption in these countries was one of the primary problems.