Mr. Tom Fadian:

I wish to comment on commonages. I am extremely worried about the way the minimum and maximum levels were arrived at because they are so far away from the appropriate levels for many areas. Flexibility is the most important factor when attempting to compile stocking levels for land and must play a large role in commonages. For the past 11 years the commonage lands have been controlled by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. Any perceived problems have not been created by the farmer concerned because he simply followed the instructions meted out by both Departments in order to accumulate his payments over the 11 year period. Previous to that experts spent four years examining every commonage across the country which amounted to close to 4,000 plots. The experts arrived at a figure and told us, as farmers, that if we followed those figures that we would have a pristine environment today. That has not been the case. The next rural development programme will span seven years and farmers should be given flexibility and allowed to farm their lands in the ways that they can manage. The farmers who farm the land know how best to do so. Today's figures for the minimum and maximum stocking levels have been set down and are rigid. No allowance has been made for different farm practices, different land types, what lands can carry, the seasonal usage of land or any of that. The areas must be flexible and people must be allowed to make decisions. It must be accepted that farmers know the best way to farm the ground and a rigid system does not help them.

There is one matter that is promising. There have been a number of submissions for an uplands management scheme. Nearly everybody across the country has made submissions of one kind or another to that effect. It is not just the farmer, but everyone in society, who can see that the farmer must be accommodated to live in that environment and to farm it.

Recently reference was made to the western seaboard. When I look back over the past 20 to 30 years, there was fishing, farming and tourism all along the western seaboard. The fishermen also farmed and provided bed and breakfast accommodation. The bed and breakfast accommodation went out of business with the building boom. Fishing had come to an end perhaps a year or two before that and had developed into a shellfish farming business in different locations. The remaining business to survive is farming. All three combined could rear a family in a village or the foothills around the mountains but given that two are lost, we must try to keep farming going in order to keep people in the villages. If the farmer is not there, then nobody will be there.