I knew that would arouse a few barbs, but it is a very serious and important farming county where, this year, they are battling in the wake of the worst harvest in half a century.
We have a duty to these people, and a duty to encourage them to produce food and not regard themselves as theme parks. If that is true of the United Kingdom as a whole, it is particularly true of Northern Ireland. My noble friend Lord Empey knows so much more about Northern Ireland than I will ever know, but I was chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in the other place for five years and I travelled there a lot. I got to know and love that part of the United Kingdom very much, and all I can say is that everything that my noble friend said tonight about farming in Northern Ireland is, if anything, an understatement; we have to take that into account.
So I will support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Curry, so that the Commons has a chance to think again. However, in order not to make my noble friend the Minister, for whom I have a very real regard, be too cross with me, I close by saying that I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Empey said about my noble friend Lord Gardiner. Would it not be a very good thing to have a Secretary of State, another Cabinet Minister, in this House? Would it not be particularly appropriate if the portfolio that that Minister held was for agriculture? I would like him to be, in the old way, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.