The Green Party would take food safety from the remit of the Department of Agriculture and give it to a new department of consumer affairs. This department's minister would have a seat at the Cabinet table.
"The message from the public is simple - they don't want their food tampered with," Cllr Mary White, the party's deputy leader and candidate in Carlow-Kilkenny, said yesterday.
"By giving responsibility for food safety to a new Consumer Affairs Department, we are ensuring that there would be a full, independent assessment of our food industry, from field to fork."
Ms White conceded that responsibility for food safety had been transferred to the Department of Health after the BSE crisis, but said the foot-and-mouth crisis had shown it to be ineffectual.
"What we're proposing is that food and food safety gets a permanent, specific home," she said.
She added that the new departments would liaise closely with both Health and Agriculture.
Cllr Deirdre de Burca, the party's candidate in Wicklow, said the Greens wanted to restore the link between producers and consumers by promoting organic food and farmers' markets.
At a time when Irish farmers found it hard to sell their beef, 13 million "beef dinners" were being imported every year from Brazil by the catering industry here, without any traceability.
"The Green Party will insist that all foods are properly labelled to show what is in the food and how it has been produced," Ms de Burca said, adding that it would also have to carry a "country of origin" label.
The party's leader, Mr Trevor Sargent, said it was "little wonder that we had mad cow disease when the free trade in food has gone mad as well." This was bad for farmers and bad for consumers.
He said farmers' markets had been an "astounding success" in both Britain and the US, enabling consumers to bypass the large supermarket chains and buy food directly from those who produce it.
According to Mr Sargent, safe food was not just a "middle-class aspiration" but something that affected everyone.
Yet the Government was "pro-genetic engineering" and in favour of pesticides.
"Eighty-five per cent of consumers do not want genetically-engineered foods, yet our Government refuses to exercise its powers under the Environmental Protection Agency Act to block experiments."
Asked what the Greens would do with some 400,000 tonnes of beef carcasses in storage since the BSE crisis, he said they had opposed the Minister for Agriculture's idea that they should all be incinerated.
He saw this as a "Trojan horse" for municipal waste incineration and suggested that there were other ways of dealing with the problem, such as alkaline digestion or cooking the carcasses in enclosed ovens.
Ms White said the culled cattle had not even been tested for BSE and they had been slaughtered merely as a "grotesque market support mechanism", because demand for beef had slumped at the time.
