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Big bird brings beef bonus

It’s probably a stretch to suggest that the main reason the Chinese Premier, Li Qiang, paid a visit to Dublin was to personally deliver good news of the reopening of Irish beef exports to help feed the burgeoning middle classes in the Peoples Republic, who are developing an increasing desire for Western-oriented diets.

Still, it was an impressive sight to watch the Boeing 747 Max8 land on an Irish runway. It was the largest commercial jet ever to come into Dublin and certainly beats the Pony Express for delivering good news to Irish beef producers.
The message of renewed access, after a short spell when an atypical BSE case

closed the Chinese market to Irish beef, was well received and, even though it will take some time to ramp up beef tonnages to China again, it did provide an early year confidence boost to the Irish beef sector. As usual, the purists were out criticising our trading with China at all, given their less than pristine human rights record. The reality is that if we were to cock our nose in the air over exporting to any country with civil or human rights or environmental or any number of issues, we would have very few countries to trade with. It’s not so long ago when our own record in relation to basic rights we now consider normal and legal would not withstand close scrutiny. 

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