This coming Monday, the European Parliament will vote on a framework that will allow gene-edited foods onto Irish supermarket shelves with zero consumer labelling and no safety screening. While we have our own ban on the cultivation of traditional genetically modified organisms, GMOs, we cannot, under this legislation, ban the import and transport of EU-approved genetic material for food and animal feed. There is a real risk that Irish organic farmers, whose livelihoods depend on keeping their crops entirely new genomic techniques, NGT, free will actually be contaminated because trace amounts of wind-blown NGT can lose them their organic certification. My understanding is also that under this final law, because it allows for an earlier law to be brought in, it is making GMOs, in this context anyway, fully patentable. Therefore, corporations will have control over some of the material. In this context, given the Government allowed this to proceed to this stage, will the Tánaiste now instruct Government MEPs to vote against the legislation so we can have further scrutiny because this will pose a risk to Irish organic farming?

I have been at this long enough to know I never instruct my MEPs. They will each consider and scrutinise these issues well, but the Deputy highlights an important issue I will not pretend to be across all the details of. I will make myself familiar with it now on foot of the Deputy raising this and will engage with my own party MEPs in advance of that vote on Monday. I am happy to come back to the Deputy on this.