Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-17-Speech-2-009"
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"en.20021217.1.2-009"2
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"Mr President, firstly I should like to thank Mr Byrne for his statement and all those involved in drawing up this report. When I first brought it to the attention of Parliament, I had no idea that it was going to be the success that it has been. It has been a positive achievement, not just for the people of the United Kingdom, and not just for the people of the European Union, but also for the European Parliament.
There were many cases, as we travelled across the European Union in our quest to find out what had happened, where people said ‘thank goodness you are organising a public inquiry’. This is the
true public inquiry into foot and mouth. It gave the general public an opportunity to voice its opinion. That is what it was about and what I had hoped to achieve.
I shall read from a letter we received from the National Foot and Mouth Association. ‘May it suffice to say that without this report, many would not have been able to deal with the epidemic and its effects.’ The epidemic had a catastrophic effect on people’s lives right across the European Union, not just those in the agricultural business, but many people in the whole of the rural community. At this point I would like to thank the rapporteur, Mr Kreissl-Dörfler, Mrs Redondo Jiménez, the Chairman, and the Commission which helped us tremendously in the Foot and Mouth Subcommittee, working with us every single day.
I would also like to thank those people who submitted evidence to the Foot and Mouth Subcommittee. We covered businesses right across the European Union. There were people from the United States and many other countries. On one occasion some of my colleagues were sitting there almost with tears in their eyes while listening to the evidence being given. One lady summed it up when she said ‘they have taken away our dreams’. That was a direct reference to the British Government. This must never happen again. This is why this temporary committee was set up.
Yes, the report has been critical of the British Government and, yes, it has attacked it on many aspects, but if the government made mistakes we, as a committee, had to look into it. The report would have been wrong if it had not looked into it and then made a judgement because the whole principle of the inquiry was that we needed to know what had gone wrong – and things had gone wrong – and then put forward proposals. We needed to see how we could put in amendments to the proposals that Mr Byrne is going to bring out.
I look forward with great interest to what Mr Byrne will say. I have one criticism of what he has just said – and here we will have to agree to disagree. In the United Kingdom, we still only have two dogs – in fact they are still in training – to check imports, compared with the 3 000 people in the United States to cover illegal imports. Mr Byrne said that he was against any proposal that would control imports from countries where FMD is endemic. I would say to him that we still do not know where this outbreak originated. We do not know exactly how it was brought into the United Kingdom. One thing we found out was that the US, Australia and New Zealand still do not have foot and mouth and they control their imports wholly.
I will sum up by saying that we need to change legislation, but we need to change attitudes – welfare, transport, imports. I know the Commission values the findings of this report and I look forward with great interest to its own report."@en1
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