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

I welcome Mr. Bertie Wall and Mr. Seán Guerin to the committee. We had a very interesting discussion with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine on this subject last week.

Mr. Wall has listed many things that must not be done. I agree with him. I think all members of the committee would agree that if a farmer has destocked and has to restock the only way to do that is to breed the sheep back on the hill over time. Allowing that 0.7 of a lamb survives for every ewe and that 50% of surviving lambs will be male and 50% female, one can see that increasing stock will be slow over time. In some years, the replacement rate will be even slower than that. Whatever restocking has to be done must take account of those calculations. We cannot suddenly go to a minimum stocking number that is far above what is on the hill.

The issue of agreement on the hills fascinates me. There was some tacit agreement on many hills and very little on some others. In the past, farmers figured things out. There were not so many fighting neighbours as might have been thought. When people are forced to do something at risk of a serious penalty, even if only one in ten commonage users gets into trouble that amounts to a large number of people. All it takes is for one very awkward person in an odd commonage here and there to put us into a really difficult situation. In the commonages I am used to, one could have up to 150 or 200 people.

We also have the issue of three types of user or owner. There is the owner with the sheep or cattle on the commonage. Then there is the owner who does not put sheep or cattle on the commonage but puts them on his area based payment and claims on them, with the risk that he will not get a payment if the new regime comes in. Finally, there is the owner who has never put anything on the commonage and has not claimed. There is a big number of those. It is a pity we cannot bring those into operation. If we could, the amount of land that would suddenly appear for area based payments in the west of Ireland, in upland areas and in the hills of Wicklow and Tipperary would suddenly increase. It is regrettable to see land not being used in any way.

The legal situation of people who own these shares, even if they are in the names of grandparents or great grandparents, is a difficulty. Has the UFA an answer to the problem or dormant shares? If someone gets commonage into his name he will have a right to put sheep on the hill. In many cases, such people have no right to single payment. I am wondering how we do this.

Is the UFA party to the discussions with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine? If so, Mr. Wall and Mr. Guerin might let us know how they got on with the Department, compared to this committee. We had a constructive meeting last year with the Department and the National Parks and Wildlife Service. I was much more assured after that meeting than I had been beforehand. Has the UFA been in discussion with the Department and have some of the issues that were of concern moved on or where are we now?

There is no need to do this in a hurry. The framework plans are still in place so there is no danger of Europe coming after us. Whatever follows the framework needs to be worked out.

Until now, some outsider gave a prescription based on numbers. When Dr. Brendan Dunford from the Burren Farming for Conservation Programme appeared before the committee, he came at this from a different point of view. He said the output should be decided in the context of what condition the land should be in and the farmer should be allowed to figure out how he gets it there, taking variables into account such as wet and dry seasons, good and bad years and the fact that stock has to be increased and described, according to many factors. There is a little trial and error in achieving the optimum stocking level. What would be the acceptability of Department not being able to tell the farmer how many sheep he should have? The only person who can figure that is the farmer because he knows the land best. The condition in which the owners of the commonage have the land at the end of the year should be the only measure as to whether a farmer complied with GEAC rather than the Department applying the wrong stocking density, which it has in the past, leading to overstocking and, in recent years, understocking, thereby creating a new set of problems. If officials had said to the farmers that they should get the land into good order and they did not care how this was done, they might have achieved a better environmental outcome.