Study looks at reviving beet industry

THE Department of Agriculture will assist with a study to assess the possibility of redeveloping the sugar beet industry, an Oireachtas committee heard yesterday.

Addressing the joint committee on agriculture, department secretary general Tom Moran said that he endorsed a proposal by Labour TD Sean Sherlock that a review of the economic benefits of producing and processing sugar beet as bioethanol should be made.

However, Mr Moran said there was no possibility of resurrecting the sugar processing industry following the March 2006 Greencore decision to forego Ireland’s quota for the industry and seek EU compensation.

“It is not possible to produce sugar for export outside the EU. In other words ‘out of quota’ sugar cannot be produced.

“The production of sugar beet for ethanol is however possible,” Mr Moran added.

Opposition TDs strongly criticised Greencore’s decision to allow the sugar beet industry to conclude and questioned why the then Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan had failed to use the powers of the Government’s ‘special share,’ maintained in the agriculture conglomerate when it was privatised in 1991, to protect the industry.

The decision led to the final closure of the country’s last remaining processing plant in Mallow in 2006.

Mr Sherlock said the handing over of the industry, established by the state in 1926, which was then allowed to end production was “nothing short of national sabotage”.

Sinn Féin’s Martin Ferris said what they were “dealing with is the giving away of a national industry to a private company concerned only with shareholders’ profits rather than the livelihoods of people.”

Fine Gael TD Noel Coonan said the real reason that Greencore made the decision was “pure greed and speculation” as the company wished to develop property on the site of its Carlow and Mallow plants.

In response to the issue of Greencore’s interest in property development Mr Moran said he thought “it is a reasonable assessment” but there was no role for the department in the decisions.

Mr Coonan and Labour TD Jack Wall compared reported contacts between then Agriculture Minister Ms Coughlan with Greencore executives to recent revelations concerning Taoiseach Brian Cowen and former Anglo Irish Bank boss Sean FitzPatrick due to claims that the minister had failed to discuss key issues with them at that time.

Mr Moran indicated that the current sugar quota regime is to be reviewed in 2015 but that “the Court of Auditors did not suggest reinstatement of quotas in members states where they have been renounced”.