FARMERS will return to Dublin streets again next week to continue protests against the EU's refusal to respond to the sharp fall in Irish beef prices.
A bitter disagreement between the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Yates, and the EU Agriculture Commissioner, Mr Franz Fischler, over beef export refunds remained deadlocked last night.
The Commissioner refused to put forward proposals to increase the refunds to a meeting of the EU's Beef Management Committee and the committee is not due to meet again for three weeks.
Angry farmers protested in Dublin last Thursday, and both the IFA president, Mr John Donnelly, and the chief executive of the Irish Meat Processors' Association, Mr John Smith, last night called for more protests next week. Mr Donnelly said his organisation would stage a day of action on Wednesday.
The Minister said last night that he was "extremely disappointed at the failure of the Commission to take action to alleviate the current difficulties being experienced by winter fatteners".
The Minister and the industry are particularly concerned that the viability of the winter fattening industry is threatened. Such a collapse would seriously damage attempts to get the continuity of supply so crucial to the European market for Irish beef.
Mr Yates said he would be sending a further letter with proposals of Mr Fischler on Monday.
The Minister will meet beef factory owners, the farmers organisations, and IBEC on Tuesday, and the shippers later in the week.
Mr Yates also reiterated his view that, given the availability of export licences issued at higher refund rates, there was no market justification for a further fall in Irish prices, and that prices should in fact be able to rise. It was a view endorsed by the IFA's Mr Raymond O'Malley, who warned that factories were attempting to exploit the situation with unjustified price cuts.
A spokesman for the Commission said that it was not convinced the fall in prices in Ireland was due to the export refund cuts, but believed it was attributable to the state of the British market arising from BSE fears. There was no support at the committee, he said, for the Irish position, and a package tailored specifically at Ireland would be enormously difficult to put together.
A Department of Agriculture spokesman said the recent rise in prices in Northern Ireland showed that the problem was not BSE related but could be placed firmly at the door of the Commission's mismanagement of the export refund system.
The Commission cut the refunds sharply in the autumn in response to a huge demand for export licences that threatened to take up the full year's GATT permitted quota of 1.1 million tonnes of subsidised exports within six months.
