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

First, I apologise that I must leave in a few minutes to go back into the Dáil. I thank Ms Keena for her presentation. There is a great deal of debate yet to take place before we resolve this issue.

Until there was interference with farmers through the schemes and by the Department and everybody else, farmers kept the land in good farming order. Before payments such as the ewe premiums were introduced, there were no major problems on the hills. Therefore, the farmers are educated. The farmers know exactly what to do on the hill if the incentive is correct. That has been a major flaw in all of the approaches to dealing with the issue of hill land.

The question the Department never answered for me when I was Minister, and nobody else has answered it, is what is the definition of a commonage. I do not believe that most hill land in Ireland that we call commonage is commonage in the true sense. It is undivided shares in a mountain, and the number sharing can range from two persons. If two brothers or cousins, or a husband and wife, hold undivided shares of land, I am not saying that is a commonage. In some cases there are five, in others it is 500. In other situations, such as in Wicklow, I understand, there are collops where one has a right to put out a certain number of sheep. It is totally different. Therefore, I do not see this as a commonage issue, which is what the Department has persisted with for 20 years. Some of the most over-grazed commonages were not commonages at all but were owned by one individual. The person farmed it badly because the ewe premium provided the same incentive.

I believe that much of what is considered good and has been advised, such as the off-wintering of sheep, taking cattle off the hill, and feeding sheep on the hill, has had the effect of under-grazing parts of the hills, over-grazing other parts and what I call the "cat at the back door" syndrome, that is, the sheep will keep coming back where they think the feed will be and will trample over part of the hill. Therefore, we need to sit down with the farmers and find out what they have to say.

In that regard, does Teagasc have a hill farm research station any more?

Does Teagasc have experts in cattle and sheep hill farming who are used to the realities and who can put their advice in the mix? Such advice was useful to me in the past when it was available. Does Teagasc have a trial hill farming station on which it tries out various feeding methods including taking animals off or on in the winter? What arrangements does it have for conducting practical research on hill farming to establish whether the prescriptive approach taken works?

Dr. Brendan Dunford came before the committee recently. I was involved in destocking because of the grant situation but I did it on a global basis. The commonage framework plans which have been introduced do not work. Dr. Dunford's approach is outputs based, which means the farmer is measured on whether the grass, land and habitat are preserved in a certain way but he or she is told how much stock to have. Farmers and experts would work together to achieve results rather than what is being done, which is the Department hands down prescriptions on numbers and when they should be on the hill. This does not tie in with the weather and it does not work. What is the view of the witnesses on this? Would it be possible to return to an outputs basis rather than the prescriptive way it is done at present?