Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will speak for seven minutes. If someone sneaks up behind me, the Leas-Cheann Comhairle can alert me and I will stop talking.

I share many of the concerns that other Deputies have articulated today. I farm. I have 26 sucklers, short-horn Herefords and around me are farmers. My father and older members of my family recall a time when our village had 25 or 30 farmers. It is now down to five or six farmers, only two of whom are full-time farmers. Most of them have gone into part-time farming. They work in jobs in Shannon, in factories, or they are teachers. They slot farming in when they are able to. It is a concern. It concerns me more when I tune into the international news at night. While we are looking at months of wet weather, other parts of world are scorched and are unable to produce agricultural produce. The global output of food is going to become rather imbalanced as the years go by.

My family went on an early summer holiday this year, believing we could be in a general election in the summer. We found ourselves in a part of Gran Canaria that has had no rain for many months. They actually put canvas tarpaulins over some of their produce to protect it from the sun. At a time when people are constructing growing tunnels, they are trying to cover their produce in the months of March and April - before we even get into the summer - to protect it from the heavy sunshine. In terms of agricultural produce, we have to have our own outputs in Ireland but we need to have a more global look, and a look within the European bloc of countries as well, as to how much we can produce. Bad and all as our weather can be, this small island nation is a great country for producing grass and grass-reared animals that can end up in the beef line and for producing finished dairy products. We need to talk ourselves up in Europe in terms of our capacity to produce these products.

I would love to see the Minister push for the possibility of protected geographical indication, PGI, status for Irish grass-produced beef and Irish dairy products. Iberian ham has this status. The blaa bread roll in Waterford has it. Different sausages in Italy have it. These are geographically intrinsic products from certain parts of Europe that have protected status. At a time when we increasingly see animals being housed indoors, fed on concentrate, the fact is that most Irish beef and most Irish dairy cows are reared on grass for most of the year. They are brought indoors for three, three and a half or four months. During that time, they are fed mostly silage or hay. In this country, we are not overly reliant on concentrates or on artificially building up the animal. It is very much a grass-based economy. We need to look for PGI status for the Irish animal so that we are not lumped in with other European countries in how they produce terminal beef and how they produce dairy products. We need to speak up for the fact that as an island nation, we have largely a grass-reared population of cattle. It would be wonderful for the Minister, with his counterparts in Europe, to look for PGI status for Irish cattle.

I would like to see fodder purchased by farmers prior to 31 March retrospectively included in the fodder transport scheme that was mentioned earlier. The dry weather of the past five or six days has given hope to farmers. Cattle are finally out of sheds. Farmers who went down to a neighbour to beg or borrow some silage and fodder bales now find that they are able to open gates and let the stock out into the fields. However, that does not negate the fact that in February and March these farmers were put to the pin of their collar. It would be great to have a retrospective angle to that.

There has been a whole national debate, some of it distorted, about rewetting. It has largely been put to bed but there is now merit to looking, as a nation, at having a scheme for draining lands, or certainly the boundaries of lands. The best meadows on my farm are now pushing up rushes. I had to go out and top them at the weekend. When it gets to late July and I attempt to make some silage, it will be a very poor-quality bale. I have gone into organics and so have many of my neighbours. We cannot fertilise this land. We are prohibited from draining it to any great extent but surely a linear drain around the boundary should be something that all farmers are once again encouraged to do. I am not talking about putting Wavin pipes the whole way down and percolation pipes the whole way through a field, but surely the linear drainage of a field should be promoted. Indeed, there should be a grant scheme at this stage to encourage farmers to do that.

I want to raise an issue that is coming up increasingly in my constituency office. When a farmer has passed away and the will goes to probate, the farmer who is succeeding him or her has to wait many months. In the mid-west region, it is taking seven months for probate to pass through. During that period, they are locked out from all of the EU farm grants and payments they should be in receipt of. Yes, there is an indemnity form that they can fill in later in the process, and they will probably get the money after four to six months. When the will is not read immediately, probate does not get lodged immediately. This means it can take 18 months from the date of death for payments to reach a farmer's bank account. It is devastating. In no other enterprise would you hear about the successor to the business having to wait 18 months for a brown penny or shilling to reach their bank account. In the case of the local drapery store, Spar shop, pub, restaurant or hotel, when someone dies and passes the business on to the next person, there would be a capital fund or the working account of that business would be available to that person. That is not the case in farming. The money gets locked in and for that 18-month period they cannot buy stock and they cannot invest in TAMS. As the various grants they are approved for require initial investment before they get a reimbursement, they cannot even do that. There has to be a better way. When someone dies and the will is straightforward, EU payments from the Department should be transferred over to the beneficiary of the will immediately so that people do not get locked into some protracted probate process. I do not believe this exists for any other enterprise, so why should it exist in farming? It does not make sense to me.

The issue of horse welfare is increasingly becoming a problem in County Clare. Certain people believe they have a God-given cultural right to own horses because they have a family history in horses. Let me remind the Minister that most Irish families did not have a motor car until the 1950s or 1960s. Every single Irish family has a history of horses. When I look back on our own family album, I see that there was always a horse and a cart at the back of the family homestead. Everyone has a cultural family history of horses but it does not entitle everyone in 2024 to have a horse. In County Clare at the moment, people in houses and non-houses are keeping horses tethered onto poles in industrial estates, tied onto caravans or hemmed in by site fencing. It is wrong. If someone is going to own a horse on this island, they had better have land they own, they had better lease land, or they had better be paying for livery. Why do we tolerate it that people have horses out the back or illegally grazing the place next door? This problem is the bane of local authorities like Clare County Council and many more across the country. Horse law is quite strict, and animal welfare is quite strict, but the enforcement is not. The laws in this area need to be better enforced. There needs to be better resourcing of enforcement. We need to pull apart from the idea or line of defence that people have a cultural entitlement to own a horse. Nobody has a cultural entitlement to own an animal and have it tethered cruelly around the neck with wire or rope - tethered to a post day in, day out - with its ribcage showing.

No one has that right and we need to grab that by the scruff of its neck.

The green cert programme is a passage into farming for many young farmers. I completed my green cert about seven years ago in Pallaskenry and it was a great foundation training in farming. People undertake the programme for two reasons, as the Minister knows well. First, it is to acquire skills they can use in their farming life, but there are also taxation benefits from it, such as stamp duty relief for young trained farmers. Teagasc does an excellent job in education and there is a wonderful team, but we are increasingly seeing that the grading and its verification by QQI is taking some time, and sometimes the grade verification does not come through in time to enable young trained farmers to avail of the taxation reliefs around it. There needs to be a prioritisation. I raised this with the Taoiseach just a few weeks ago, when he was Minister for higher education. There needs to be some element of prioritisation for people nearing their 35th birthday, when they will lose out on funding.

On the delays in ACRES payments, what capacity will the Department have for next spring? I know there will not be new entrants per seand it will be mostly a rollover of everyone again, given they are locked into a multiannual scheme. Nevertheless, can we get some reassurances, when the Minister makes his concluding statement, that there will be capacity in the Department to process these payments in a timely way? They are so important. In County Clare, where 85% of our farming enterprise is based on the suckler beef model, farmers are dependent on these grants and make very little at the marts when they try to sell terminal animals.

I could go on, but if the Minister might respond to some of my points when he is making his concluding statement, I would be very grateful.

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