In the Seanad on a debate on agriculture on November 6 2002, I said:

I want to condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the squalid little deal on agriculture entered into between France and Germany at the last European Council and fully colluded in by this Government.

The net effect of this cosy little arrangement is to put the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy off the agenda for the foreseeable future.

I am proud to be Irish and a European citizen and I am well known around the world as a champion of the Irish food industry, but I cringe every time I hear of a new refusal by Europe to face up to realties in regard to the CAP.

For as long as we leave the CAP unreformed, we are trying to live in the past.

In its present form, the policy is both hugely wasteful and highly inefficient, even in reaching its own declared objectives. It penalises the majority of Europeans at the expense of a small minority. Even worse, it penalises the peoples of the developing world by distorting the world marketplace for their agricultural goods.

In Ireland, successive Governments have taken precisely the wrong attitude towards this cancer in the European project. We did not invent it - it was there when we joined - but instead of recognising it for the uneconomic, unfair and ultimately unsustainable monster that it was, we fell on it like manna from heaven.

As a predominantly agricultural country, we would have had immense moral authority if we had chosen instead to lead the way out of the quagmire our partners had created for themselves before we joined. Unlike Britain, which has clear vested interests in this matter, no one would have questioned our bona fides if we had put a hand up and told the truth.

That truth, which has been staring us in the face for 30 years, is that the CAP cannot survive as a permanent part of a united Europe.

We need to face up to this and to debate it but the debate is unheard. Some of what I have to say is anathema to some Members who have spoken.

Instead of planning for life after CAP, we decided to stick out heads in the sand and pretend we could drag out the good times forever. We have persisted in this doomed policy at enormous cost. First, in absolute terms, the agricultural policy swallows up the lion's share of the EU budget year after year. Valery Giscard d'Estaing wants us to change the name of the EU yet again. If we named it after where the money goes, maybe we should call it "The Union of European Farmers".

For an entity with the aspirations of the European Union to spend 75% of its entire annual budget on farm supports shows a peculiar sense of priorities indeed. That is, however, not the nub of my objection to the policy.

I believe in supporting farms and farmers. I believe in developing the food industry in Ireland and across Europe and helping people to preserve the rural way of life. In particular, I believe in helping people in rural areas find new ways beyond agriculture of developing the economic potential in those areas.

I am the first to admit that these measures will cost the broad mass of citizens an arm and a leg but what I will not admit is that the CAP is the right way to go about that.

Two categories of people are short-changed by the Common Agricultural Policy.

The first category is the ordinary customers, the broad mass of the nearly half a billion people the European Union will soon embrace through enlargement. They must pay twice for the Common Agricultural Policy and the smallest part of what they pay is through the taxes that fund the European budget but the most important burden on them is the higher prices they pay every day when they go out to buy their food.

Every time they buy food, week in and week out, they pay more than they should have to pay. The prices they pay are determined by the market laws of supply and demand. These prices are totally artificial and are determined by the need to use the market to deliver a certain level of support to farmers throughout the Union.

Instead of supporting farmers directly, we support them mainly through a price support system that is totally inappropriate and it is obvious to any independent economist that this system does not benefit anybody. It certainly does not benefit the consumers who buy the food. It does not benefit farmers either because, despite what it may have done in the past, the Common Agricultural Policy fails to provide a proper living to most European farmers.

Falling incomes have driven more and more people off the land and instead have encouraged large scale, more intensive farming that produces commodities of often dubious quality. I say that as somebody who knows the difficulty involved in getting top quality food on occasions. A total of 80% of all EU subsidies go to 20% of farmers, in other words, they go to the big farmers.

The CAP encourages the wasteful over-production of food. It is a peculiar irony that a system originally designed to make Europe self-sufficient in food is now characterised, more than anything else, by the fact that it results in too much food being produced year after year.

This is where the other mass of people who are short-changed by the CAP come in - the people of the developing world. The negative effect of the CAP, and the European trade policy that springs directly from it, is much greater for them than it is even for the people of Europe.

On the one hand, we keep the produce from the developing world out of our own market and, on the other, we undermine prices for them elsewhere in the world by flooding other markets with all our surpluses at uneconomic prices. As a result, those people cannot get into those markets and compete.

Meanwhile, we beat our breasts about the need to help developing countries as long as that help is delivered in the least suitable way in the form of large gifts or grants of cash. We give them with one hand while using the other to prevent them trading in the only things they have to trade. If we traded fairly, we could keep all our aid and the developing world would still be better off.

What we are doing is not only bad economics, it is a morally rotten way to behave. It is an amazing way for a country like Ireland to behave with all our traditions and values.

If we persist in behaving that way, we cannot hope, as Europeans, to gain the influence and respect we seek in the rest of the world.

From the viewpoint of those in the developing world, they see the two great powerhouses of wealth - the United States and Europe - lined up against them. Both powerhouses undermine the developing world by distorting food markets and subsidising farm production in their own areas. Of the two, however, Europe is by far the worst offender.

Ireland should lead the way out of this policy that is both economically and morally bankrupt.

No one could ever question the regard we have for farmers, agriculture and the rural way of life.

If we were to say to our partners, with the moral standing we would have as a result of our own vested interests, that we have to find a better way of achieving our objectives, would they not listen to us?

Would they listen if we were to say, with a degree of moral standing, that it is now time to turn our backs on the 20th century and find a way forward for agriculture that is right for the 21st century?

They may or may not listen but at least we could be proud of what we were doing.

Sadly, we cannot be proud of what we are doing now.