“We don’t see New Zealand as a threat to our farmers,” Senator Neale Richmond, spokesman on EU Affairs for Fine Gael, Ireland’s largest parliamentary party, said. He was commenting after taking part in an NZ/Ireland “friendship group” meeting of parliamentarians and senators which included NZ Minister of Agriculture Damien O’Connor, NZ High Commissioner to the UK Sir Jerry Mateparae, Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade (and deputy prime minister) Simon Coveney, and Irish Minister of Agriculture Michael Creed.
“Our deputy PM and farm minister wouldn’t have been laying out the red carpet if we saw NZ as a threat,” Senator Richmond said, adding he viewed NZ as a trading gateway into the Australasian market and that, similarly, NZ saw Ireland as a trading gateway into the wider EU marketplace.
The Senator, who is also chairman of the Irish Senate’s Brexit Committee, took a very different stance on the EU’s approaching Mercosur deal.
“To be blunt, NZ’s food safety and production standards are in line with what we do in Ireland while that’s not the case with either Argentina or Brazil,” he said. “There’s a lot of difference between exposure to taking cheap meat from the Mercosur region and receiving high-quality, well-bred lamb from NZ.
“We see NZ trade as being complementary. As such, our meeting with Minister O’Connor and the High Commissioner was very positive.”
Ireland and NZ are due to open embassies in each other’s countries later this year, further increasing their two-way level of engagement on a people-to-people basis ,while also looking to build stronger trading relationships between the two nations.
In addition to trade issues, there was also considerable discussion during the meeting about the potential to increase the exchange of young farmers between NZ and Ireland.
“Quite a lot of young Irish farmers already travel to NZ to learn new farming methods and work in different areas, and we accommodate a number of NZ farmers doing the same here,” Senator Richmond said. “We agreed to look at expanding these exchanges further in the future.”
