Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Reference was made to farmers farming 50 sheep over 1,000 acres. The only farmers I know forced to chase 1,000 acres for 50 sheep have been forcefully destocked by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. They are not allowed to have 200 or 400 sheep and there is as much chasing in 50 ewes across the mountain in a commonage of 1,000 acres as there is in 400 ewes. One must still gather them up and separate them from the neighbours' sheep. The idea is that many hill farmers willingly and knowingly have low numbers of stock.

The Minister should watch for the following point in his payment regime. Europe is very ecologically minded at the moment and, because the sheep have been taken from farmers forcibly, many young farmers will not chase through the mountains for the sheep. There will be an ecological disaster of land abandonment. When that happens, Europe will fine Ireland severely in agriculture payments and ecological fines for not maintaining the mountains in good farming order. In that circumstance, the lowland farmer could be paying the penalty for not making it viable for the hill farmer to get out on the hill and maintain the sheep. If members think land abandonment is not a reality, they should go to Scotland. It is a significant problem there because they are not allowed to keep the number of stock they believe make it viable to go up the hill. The idea does not stand up.

I never said the biggest farmers were the armchair farmers, I said the evidence appears to be that where the leasing of a farm with a big single payments is happening, it is not in the hill areas. Mr. John Enright accepted the analysis. The analysis after the derogation in the hill areas this year bears out my point. It is happening in the lowlands. There are a certain number of armchair farmers in the country and nothing will stop them. It is not something connected to low payments; it is connected more to the intensive leasing that takes place in the land and letting of land in the 11 months system on more fertile parts of the country. That is where the armchair farming exists but I do not know how to stop it. We could examine the rules. The idea that increasing the single farm payment to farmers on bad land would make them all armchair farmers is nonsense.

To go back to the statistics, there are more than 2,000 farmers in receipt of more than €50,000. This represents approximately 2% of all farmers and they receive a payment that amounts to 12% of payments even though they have the best farms. Like other schemes, I suggest these farmers are doing very well and we are talking about a seven year slide-off. At the beginning of the debate, as agriculture spokesperson, I said this must be done on a slide-off basis because it cannot be handled like the farmers with REPS, where they were told overnight the payment would go. I did not agree with what happened with REPS. There should be a cap, which will help the other 90% of farmers. I am amazed at the fight being put up for the 2% at the expense of the 90%. Good on Senator O'Neill, he can explain it to the farmers and I will explain my side to farmers. In all the counties in Ireland, the highest average single payment is in Kilkenny, at €16,000. If there is a standard deviation around the mean even in Kilkenny there must be few, if any, farmers receiving over €50,000, it will show that some 90% of farmers will be under the ceiling to which I referred.