Edwin Poots’ first visit to the National Ploughing Championships has left him suitably impressed by the scale of it.
As the North’s agriculture minister, he has visited the Royal Welsh Show, the Highland Show and the Royal Ulster Agricultural Show - better known as the Balmoral Show - but the ploughing is the biggest of them all. One official said it is 10 times bigger than Balmoral.
“It is really, really large scale in terms of the offer that’s out there. I have to say I have thoroughly enjoyed it,” he said, so much so that he is spending two days at it.
Northern producers are out in force this year. More than 90 are participating and the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) pavilion showcases the best food and drink coming from the North.
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Farming, he says, has always transcended borders. His father Charlie Poots, a founder member of the DUP, was also a farmer and would come down south regularly to buy cattle. “If there is product, people will go after that product. There was a lot of west of Ireland cattle brought to Northern Ireland. They were good cattle in terms of beef quality. That’s going to continue. It’s always going to be the case. Borders won’t stop these things happening.”
He met Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue on Tuesday. Farmers on both sides of the Border are facing the same challenges – dealing with climate change being a looming one.
He says the notion that farmers are bad for the climate is a “myth that needs to be debunked”. Mr Poots continued: “It is inaccurate. People who have little knowledge of agriculture, often with another agenda, an anti-meat agenda, are trying to use the environment as a means of reducing that type of business.
“In truth the grass is sequestering methane from the atmosphere that the cows eat so it is quite natural that there is methane produced from it, but it much more circular than people actually are prepared to recognise.”
Mr Poots’ party is insisting the Northern Ireland protocol be changed or it will not return to the Stormont executive. The other parties in the North have accused the DUP of political blackmail.
Mr Poots does not see a change of approach now that Britain has a change of prime minister. Instead, he states that it is up to the EU to move. “The European Union has shown a degree of rigidity which has damaged their reputation in Northern Ireland and being destructive to the Good Friday Agreement. That is entirely untenable. They need to respect the Good Friday Agreement. They need to ensure there is cross-party support for whatever is agreed.
“Unionists in particular in Northern Ireland are entirely up for protecting the European Union’s single market. We have no interest in harming it one way or another, but the barriers that have been put up between Great Britain and Northern Ireland are entirely unnecessary to do that.”
He cites the example of the North’s beef producers, who import carcasses from Great Britain, process them and then ship them back. Five to 10 per cent of the product goes to the EU. “They are happy to conduct all of the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures checks. That’s an example of how it can be done in that sector and can be replicated in other sector,” he explains. “Most of the radical thinking needs to come from the European Union on stepping back. We can ensure that the European single market is safe. There are technologies that exist now which will be used in borders across the world and are currently being implemented by local companies in Northern Ireland.”
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The new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Chris Heaton-Harris has said the prospect of fresh elections for Stormont before Christmas is not an “idle threat”. Under current rules minister must stand down on October 28th and there must be an election after that within 12 weeks unless a new executive is formed.
Mr Poots responds: “No, there will not be an election between now and Christmas. I don’t see the solution being achieved between now and Christmas by the way unless there is rapid movement of position from the EU side in particular.
“We are not in a great place. We want stability in Northern Ireland. We want to move things forward. We want to ensure that we are focused on the things we need to focus on – the energy crisis, cost of living crisis, the health service. Those things should be taking our focus almost entirely.
“The protocol has dragged on for two to three years. It is unfortunate that it has taken the assembly not to be active and operating to see people sit up and look at it seriously. That is a sad reflection on people who were warned and warned what was coming down the line, but consistently ignored those warnings.”
The Northern Ireland census results are out on Thursday and they may show Catholics outnumbering Protestants for the first time, an unthinkable scenario when Northern Ireland was created in 1921. If the census figures turn out to be correct, what do they mean for the union?
“The union increasingly over the last 20 or 30 years has become less about your Protestant and Catholic. The Catholic population increased in 2011 but the numbers who voted for nationalist parties has decreased,” he states.
“What I would say about living in Northern Ireland is that you can be British or you can be Irish, you can be an Ulster man or woman or Northern Irish or you could be all four at one time. I consider myself to be all four. I live in the British Isles, so I’m British, I live on the island of Ireland so I’m Irish. I live in Northern Ireland, so I’m northern Irish and I live in the province of Ulster. I’m very happy and relaxed in my own skin.”
