Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I concur with the Ceann Comhairle’s remarks regarding Deputy Paul Murphy's contribution. I am not sure where in the country - never mind what part of the planet - what the Deputy had to say related to.

Farming is heading fast to a crossroads and that intersection includes farm unviability, farm loss, future consolidated factory farming and economic loss to regional and rural communities. My county of Waterford has a mix of farming. All parts of the sector there are under extreme pressure. This pressure is most evident in the tillage sector. Months of rainfall have saturated the land, preventing the sowing and harvesting of winter crops. While the recent €100 support announced for tillage farmers was welcome, we are now into a reduced growing season and it is likely the harvest will not be sufficient to cover this year’s expenditure, let alone make up the losses for last year.

The fragility of food security means it should never be taken for granted. In the lifetime of our parents, war and malign ideologies led to serious food shortages in Europe and famine in the USSR states and in Communist China, all man-made disasters either intended or resulting from plain government incompetence. The wisdom of Europe's post-war CAP should never be taken for granted either. It is true that modern farming methods have improved food supply, consistency and quality, but it should not be overlooked that in the lifetime of some of our family members, the world population has increased from 2.5 billion to more than 8 billion today.

The recent bad weather in northern Europe will have a knock-on effect on the supply of some foods, especially plant-based ones, across the Continent as well as in Ireland. Therefore, the reduction of supports to the food producers in the fields is ill-considered, unwise and irresponsible. Ireland's commercial tillage sector has seen its CAP-designated supports reduced drastically in the past 20 years, and with increasing rapidity recently. This will ultimately lead to what is a plant-based food system becoming totally uneconomic and unsustainable. The Government recently introduced measures that it said are helpful but these are merely sticking plasters being applied to a seriously sick sector. The tillage sector in Ireland is very kind to the environment, with low carbon dioxide emissions, and it should be viewed as being a vital national asset.

What is needed? The first thing is the reduction of well-meaning but impractical edicts from officeholders in central Government. We also need a realisation that measures imposed on other sectors can and do impact on Ireland's tillage sector. We need a re-coupling of supports to genuine tillage farmers. We need a guarantee that wastewater and sewage sludges being applied to farmland do not contain any poisons, industrial pharma, hospital waste, hydrocarbons or unknown pollutants. These could result in farmland exclusion from food production in the future. In other words, we do not want our food-producing land being used as a dump for the above waste products.

Most of all, we need to dispense with the building urban-rural divide. Farming is the backbone of our rural and regional communities. It is embedded in rural social, economic and community activity. When farming is going well in the country, the country is going well, but farming is not going well at present. These future custodians of the land must be better recognised and better supported by the State, and the recent divisions that have been created around climate and environmental narratives must change also. The future of Ireland is intertwined with the future of farming. It is about time the people, the media and the politicians started to understand that more clearly.

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