asked the Minister for Industry, Trade, Commerce and Tourism if he will provide details of the volume of imports of hides, leather and component parts, including plastic material, from all countries inside and outside the EC, especially Third World countries for each of the past 15 years; and the reason no effective action was taken to stem the inflow of foreign leather and plastic materials which have had such a ruinous effect on the Irish leather tanning and footwear industry.
Written Answers. - Leather and Plastic Material Imports.
33.
The statistics requested by the Deputy are published by the Central Statistics Office and are obtainable in the "Trade Statistics of Ireland" series.
Ireland's industrial progress is heavily dependent on the degree of freedom of international trading and any measures to reduce that mutual freedom, between trading partners, would be seriously disadvantageous to Ireland. Our trading obligations are of course defined within the context of our membership of the EC agreements with third countries arising from EC trade agreements.
In practical terms, the market for cheap low-quality leathers is not an appropriate target market for the high-quality hides and leathers arising in Ireland. The best prospects of success for Irish hide processing lie in converting the high-quality raw material into the high priced quality and speciality leathers for which a significant market exists in Europe and the US.
Leather is not a homogeneous product; different types and qualities of hides are required to manufacture different leathers for different end uses. One result of this is that the type of hide arising in Ireland is not suitable for many kinds of leather products and therefore the importation of leathers would be necessary however successful the Irish tanneries.
In addition, the Irish market for the kinds of leathers produced here is far too small to support a viable leather industry. The main markets for Irish leather lie outside Ireland and the importation of leathers of various kinds into Ireland has, therefore, little effect on the tanneries.
The situation in respect of plastic materials substituting for leather in the footwear and other industries is also, in the first instance, similarly bound up with our international trading obligations. The practical situation arising from the shift from leather to plastic materials in, e.g., the footwear industry, similarly has little relevance to the development of the Irish leather industry. The dictates of the market ensure that there is little, if any, effective substitution between cheap plastic materials and high-quality leather. The effects of such imports on the Irish tanning industry would therefore be minimal.