Michael Comiskey (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the delegates and thank them for their very interesting presentations. I have worked with all of them in the past on the commonage issue. While we have moved a good distance since, as they rightly said, there are still a number of commonages which are over-grazed and others that are under-grazed. The problem still persists and something has to be done, rightly so. It is very important that we bring everybody on board, in particular farmers, because we must have agreement before we can enforce anything.

When we talk about enforcement, the question we start to ask ourselves is who receives the payment, particularly where there are dormant shares and older farmers are not prepared to farm land. Will the younger farmer who farms the land and perhaps stocks it with the agreement of those not able to do it be the one who receives the payment? We have to go down that road.

There is the suggestion that very large tracts of commonage should be fenced where sheep tend to wander. Where there are small numbers of sheep, if areas were fenced off, it would be possible to contain them and the farmer would not have to travel as far to prevent stock from getting lost, which is a big problem on commonages in that animals wander and get lost in the hills.

With regard to the Pillar 2 schemes such as the REPS, the AEOS which is replacing the REPS, the disadvantaged areas scheme, the sheep grassland scheme and the sheep discussion group scheme, if all of these schemes were included together in one package, it would make it really worthwhile and encourage farmers to get involved.

We have touched on the issue of whether sheep stay in one area or wander. A survey was undertaken by Teagasc on a farm in County Mayo where the monitors attached to sheep proved that, starting early in the morning, they would travel some 15 miles in a day but that they would always return to the one spot at evening time.

I often tell the story of local people managing the commonage. There is a large commonage in my area which local people were well able to manage during the 1960s before the Department of Agriculture became involved. I dread to think what would happen today if this was attempted because people simply would not agree to it. However, local people always came together and it was our job once a month to gather up all of the stock on the commonage to count them. If a farmer was found to be abusing his or her position, he or she was fined. That worked very well, although it might be more difficult to put such a system in place today.

I hope some of these ideas will prove useful.