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

Ba mhaith liom fáilte a chur roimh na hoifigigh atá anseo ón NPWS agus ón Roinn Talmhaíochta, Bia agus Mara. Is dóigh liom gurb í seo ceann de na ceisteanna is tábhachtaí a tháinig faoi bhráid an choiste ó bunaíodh an coiste. Tá cur i láthair thar a bheith cuimsitheach déanta ag na finnéithe ar an ábhar seo. Creidim nach féidir linn an fhadhb ar fad a réiteach inniu. Beidh orainn teacht ar ais agus tuilleadh plé a dhéanamh faoi.

The two presentations were very comprehensive and very helpful. That said, given that so many issues were raised by them and that this issue is so complex, I do not believe we will be able to have the input I would like this committee, as the one which represents the electorate, to have into this very complex and important issue. I will ask some specific questions but I suggest the whole committee, or a sub-group of it, be set up to pursue this issue in more detail with the Department because many questions remain unanswered.

One of the first questions which strikes me, and which I would like to tease out in much more detail, is this LPIS. What is an LPIS and how is it defined? In many cases, if one destocks one commonage, sheep will move into the next one because there are no fences between the different commonages. In fact, it is one huge area and sheep will move over the top of the mountain. If, for example, one destocks one side of the mountain completely, the sheep will not stay on their one LPIS, they will move over to the ungrazed part.

That raises a second issue about which I was not quite clear from the presentation, namely, whether there are overgrazed and undergrazed areas on the one LPIS, even though the sheep have access to the whole area of land. That, in turn, raises the very significant issue, which I am not sure has been fully teased out, of the effect of off-wintering of sheep on the nature of the actual grazing pattern itself or the effect the feeding of sheep, in particular ewe hoggets in the low fields or on the low part of the hill where the sheep know to come down to get the feed, has had on the grazing patterns of the sheep? Does that affect the usage of the commonage and does it mean that one gets very uneven patterns of grazing which have nothing to do with absent stock numbers? Does one get an overgrazed section and undergrazed section? What research has been done on the effect so-called improved farming practices have had on the commonages?

When I was in the Department, it was generally the belief that cattle had not been a major contributor to overgrazing on commonages because of the way cattle graze. That view seems to have changed over the years and cattle were taken off the commonages for months. Could we get more clarity on this whole issue of complementary grazing? Cattle and sheep graze in a very different way, and horses graze in a totally different way again. Has it really been beneficial taking cattle off or was the mixture an advantage?

I refer to an issue I often hear as a concern to farmers and a cause of undergrazing. Farmers will tell one that they have the same distance to travel for 20 or 30 ewes as for 120 or 130 ewes and that it is not worth keeping that number of ewes and, therefore, they are getting out of hill farming. That is leading to undergrazing. There is the whole issue of viable flocks. If farmers must cover a whole townland looking for their sheep, there must be a decent number of sheep there.

That leads to the whole issue of dormancy and what worried me in the presentation by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. There are three classes of farmers. There are those who have dormant shares and who do not claim or use them. There is a fair number who claim both the hill and the lowland but who do not farm the hill. Then there are those who claim the hill and the lowland and who farm both. If one says to the farmers who do not farm the hill that they must do so and if one has a fixed number of sheep on the commonage, they will then have to push the neighbours' numbers down to get in on the commonage to preserve their rights to get the payments from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. However, if one does that, one might find that one is making all other flocks totally unviable and is reducing the size of the flock which is not solving any problem. One is not saving any money and is getting the exact same number of sheep on the commonage which one would have got if one had this tacit arrangement between the neighbours that some farmed it and others did not. The implicit threat not to pay farmers for parts of the farm they do not graze could have a whole series of unintended consequences and adds nothing to the commonages.

In my experience, there would have been no undergrazing of the commonages if one had not reduced all the farmers on the commonage on the basis that they were all going to farm it and, therefore, cause the undergrazing. If the farmers farming it could have put more sheep on it to make up for all the dormant shares, they would have done so but they were not allowed. The Department created the problem because it would not allow them to put them up and to compensate for the high level of dormancy. I do not think we should compound the problem by reversing the engines and forcing everybody to put the sheep up on the hill because viability of flocks is a very important part of this.

Will the Department comment on what the National Parks and Wildlife Service said about high nature farming and the fact that Europe, in particular European taxpayers, including Irish taxpayers, are willing to pay to ensure these lands are kept in good farming condition? Listening to the mood on the ground in urban Europe, it is very insistent that these areas are kept in good condition. Both the Department and the National Parks and Wildlife Service have agreed that this cannot be done other than by actively farming these areas and they are clear that there is no such thing as a wild area unfarmed in Ireland. These areas were in good condition before the ewe premium came in and were actively farmed for centuries. They are not wild lands but farmed lands and if one ceases to farm them, one will get a total ecological disaster.

That means that people who are willing to chase sheep up mountains - it is no easy job chasing sheep around a mountain - must get a return for their income.

Their productivity is limited because the number of stock they can put on it cannot exceed a certain number, therefore, there is a need for compensation. It is clear that REPS and AEOS compensation will become minimal in respect of hills in the future because the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is going to insist on good agricultural and environmental conditions, GAEC, and that to get the single payment these are kept in pristine order. I do not know to whom REPS and AEOS will be paid in the future because most of the REPS was based on a virtual destocking calculated by the Department and then committed to Brussels. In that regard, it is extraordinary that the Department has been fighting vehemently against the Commission's proposal to compensate farmers for all the restrictions because they are in a high nature value area and are involved in high nature farming that is of huge value to the European Union taxpayer in respect of the single farm payment. The goods they are producing are as important to the EU taxpayer, and have been the subject of endless court cases, as milk and beef produced by other farmers, and are very different but in terms of the EU paymaster, as with the greening proposals, they are equally important in their scale of priorities. There is the old saying, he who pays the piper calls the tune. I was wondering whether there is a contradiction in terms in the Department's approach in trying to keep the farmers on low payments virtually on low payments because of their counter proposals in respect of Pillar 1 payments. The REPS payment was a good substitute. I have seen a large number of the printouts in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Some of the farmers who own hills would have received a REPS payment of €11,800. I do not believe there will be any significant payment under the new Common Agricultural Policy because one has to get through good farming practice and greening before one gets the REPS, both of which will demand that one does all the things for which one was paid REPS previously. Therefore, their only chance of compensation is through Pillar 1.

We always speak about commonages. I remember having this debate in the Department because I was always told the commonage was so bad. Déarfainn go bhfuil aithne agaibh ar an dtalamh uafásach atá ar an mbealach isteach an bóthar ón Mám. Bhí píosa talún ansin a bhí thar a bheith go dona agus bhíodh an Roinn i gcónaí ag rá liom gur sampla uafásach de droch chaitheamh a bhí ann. Ach ba le duine príobháideach amháin é ach níor aithin siad é sin. Mar sin, cén fáth an idirdhealú idir coimíneacht agus gnáth talamh sléibhe. Why the artificial division between whether two people, 200 people or one person owns land? If it is overgrazed it is overgrazed and if it is undergrazed it is undergrazed and surely the ownership structure is immaterial. Even when I was in the Department I used to have a perennial battle about defining this as a commonage problem rather than what tended to be an upland problem with certain types of land.

Dialogue is the only way forward. There is a need for continuing dialogue between the committee and the witnesses. I am pleased that my colleague, Deputy Seán Kyne from Galway West is present, although not a member of the committee. I am aware of his shared interest in this matter given that he is an agricultural expert. We will not resolve the issue today. Public representatives have a key role to play before it becomes policy. What normally happens is that there is some dialogue between the Department and the farming organisations and the policy is decided. Then the people on the ground disagree with their farming organisations and approach their public representatives and, at that stage, the farming organisations ask why we did not stop this happening and what we will do about it. As the people who are representative of all the people we should be in at the bottom floor and have a real input, not just come to the committee with a presentation and say it was all very interesting; I mean a real input, more of an input than the farming organisations.

If I take Connemara as one area, there is only one farm organisation there, the Irish Farmers Association, but by no means does it represent the majority of farmers there. The vast majority of farmers in Connemara are not active members of any farming organisation good, bad or indifferent. The only people who represent them are the people whom they sent to Dáil Éireann on their behalf. It is vital that we do not just have a pitch at this today, but that we will get an opportunity to go through every line of the Department's proposal in the coming weeks in order that we can answer for the policy decisions. If the Minister then makes a policy decision totally different from what we recommend, fine, but we should be in it at this stage and have an opportunity to make a detailed input into this policy.