Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy very much for raising the important issue of fertiliser prices. I think we all know that the price of fertiliser has gone through the roof in the last year or so. As the Deputy mentioned, some of that is linked to the increase in the cost of oil and gas. There is also the situation in Ukraine and Russia, where much of the fertiliser comes from. I know that very high fertiliser prices have cancelled out a lot of the gains that farmers had got from strong prices for what they produced.

I am not aware of the details when it comes to the disparity in prices between Ireland and the UK. I will ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine to examine that and see if it can be explained or what the reason is. I do not see why there should be a major disparity between the prices that farmers pay for fertilisers here versus in the UK or other parts of western Europe.

What may be of interest to the Deputy is that there was some positive news for farmers in the announcement made today regarding the temporary business energy support scheme, TBESS. Farmers can and have applied for that to help them with the cost of oil and gas. Since that scheme did not have the drawdown we expected, we are changing it, which means that more businesses, including farmers, will be able to qualify, more businesses will get more money from the scheme, and it will be backdated to September. Thousands of euro could be coming into farmers' bank accounts in the next few weeks because of the changes made to that scheme, which I think will be welcome.

In recognition of the fact that a lot of businesses in rural Ireland do not use gas or do not have access to the gas network, there is going to be a scheme to help with the cost of kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas, LPG, for businesses in rural areas in particular that are not on the gas network, that use LPG and kerosene, and that did not benefit from the TBESS up until now.

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