‘Project fear gone mad’: Alliance Party leader Naomi Long slams Edwin Poots over food shortage comments

Ms Long, whose party opposed Brexit, hit out at the DUP Agriculture Minister in a radio interview broadcast by the BBC earlier today.

She was responding to claims from Mr Poots that if current, temporary trading arrangements aren’t extended that hospital patients and school children could be forced to go without food.

“It was made very clear to us by the suppliers to both hospitals and schools that if the current arrangement for supermarkets isn’t extended in a few months’ time that they will not be able to supply our hospitals and schools with food,” said Minister Poots.

“That is a major crisis and I have raised this with Michael Gove.

“Seriously, are we going to have a situation where our hospitals and schools are not able to feed the children at school, they’re not able to feed their patients?

“That is an outrageous situation that we in Northern Ireland have been put in as a result of the protocol negotiated between the UK Government and the European Union.”

Responding to those comments in a BBC Radio Ulster interview this morning, Naomi Long — who holds the post of Justice Minister in the Northern Ireland Executive — said: “I was absolutely horrified that he would have said such a thing when we’ve been speaking to the same suppliers, the same individuals, and that has not been the message we have received.

“There have, of course, been a number of products that we are struggling to get to the shelves at the moment because of a mixture of different problems that we are facing. The Health Minister and indeed his colleague, the Education Minister, have both said that that was simply not correct, that there was no threat to being able to provide food. The issue will be one about choice in terms of consumers at this point time.

“We are working through those issues to try and ensure that we are able to restore some of those product lines to the shelves. But I think it is shocking when ministers make statements like that which are not substantiated in terms of the facts, even with other departments.”

She continued: “We know that there are challenges and no one is denying that those challenges are real, and we are working through those challenges at the moment. but there is no suggestion in any of teh conversations that we have had that we will be in a situation where we won’t have food for schools or hospitals. We may not have the product line that we previously had, and we will work through a process of trying to get those restored or supplanted with something else.”

The Alliance Party leader also hit out at the DUP for supporting Brexit before “over-egging” its impact.

“To be fair, I think when other ministers including a minister from the same party are coming out and saying it’s not the case, I think you have to take that fairly seriously,” she said.

“It is frustrating for those of us who warned the impact of Brexit may affect food supplies, it may affect the cost of food on our shelves, it may lead to reduced choice for customers. We were dismissed as project fear when we raised these issues.”

She added: “Now we have people who were the cheerleaders and architects of Brexit really over-egging concerns about it in a kind of project fear gone mad.”