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

I welcome the delegation from the IFA, in particular its president, Mr. John Bryan, as well as Mr. Gerry Gunning, Mr. Tom Fadian and Mr. Flor McCarthy. They had a significant advantage over the committee, even though we are a committee of elected representatives, in that from what they have said, they were involved in the negotiations for a year. We became aware of the plans just before the letter was ready to issue. At that stage the committee asked the Minister not to issue the letters so that the committee of Senators and Teachtaí Dála would have an opportunity to examine the proposals. I thank the Chairman for the good work he did in persuading the Minister to hold back until we had an opportunity to examine the issue in detail.

Much has been said by the witnesses. It was mentioned that cattle and sheep are required to graze commonages, but there seems to be a perception in some places that sheep are the only species to be put on a hill. I regularly get phone calls from a local farmer who reminds me that the Connemara pony is also an important grazer on mountain commonages and mountain land in general in Connemara. Cattle and sheep are complementary grazers and it is important to remember that both are required. I was a little taken aback to find out that in the small print of the budget, cattle farmers on mountain land have been cut back €137 per annum in the disadvantaged area payment if they own more than ten hectares. I wondered whether the IFA was consulted on the cutback. It took me some time to find out as the Minister kept referring to the fact that he had not cut back payments to hill sheep farmers. I asked myself why he kept mentioning sheep and when I pursued him on the issue, he eventually admitted that he had cut back payments to cattle farmers on mountains.

No allusion has been made to one issue that is crucial in terms of money for farmers. In my experience of commonages, there are three groups of people involved. First, one has the people who claim all their land, have sheep or cattle and use the commonage proactively. Then there are those who claim all their land but do not put animals on the commonage. Finally, there are those who do not claim any of the commonage land at all. The solution, as discussed previously, is for active farmers to buy out the third group.

For people who claim commonage on their area-based payment but who do not farm it, has the Department given any reassurance that it will not refuse to pay either disadvantaged area payment or single farm payment on the land? If the Department were to withdraw the payment on the land, it would be totally different from what it does for non-commonage land, which is that as long as it is kept in good agricultural and environmental condition, GAEC, it is up to oneself how one does that. One can have fields that one never puts cattle into and one still gets paid for it under the area-based payment.

If one were to force all farmers who have commonage to farm actively and at the same time put restrictions on commonages as to the amount of cattle or sheep that can be kept, then in the case of 20 farmers with an entitlement to put cattle or sheep on a hill but where only ten do so and the other ten claim for it under area-based payment, if the latter group can only be paid by putting cattle or sheep on the hill, it will mean one will go from ten farmers doing so to 20. The ten who already had stock on the hill will have to cut their numbers in half because of the limit on the amount of stock allowed. It will be a zero sum game because the Department will wind up with the same number of cattle and sheep on the hill but most of the flocks will become unviable because they will be much smaller than they were heretofore. Was the IFA given an absolute assurance that payment will continue under the new CAP on commonages where a person does not necessarily put cattle or sheep on a hill?

The point was made that hill farmers have bigger farms but in fact if low payments per hectare are anything to go by, farmers with the lowest payment per hectare also have the smallest farms. That is the experience in my constituency. There are some large hill farmers in Connemara but they are few in number. I can count them on two hands. The reality is that people with the low payments and who tend to be hill farmers have on average 32 hectares, whereas the people with the highest payments have an average of 44 hectares. The latter farms are approximately 33% bigger. On average, low payments and small size go together. That is because they are commonages. In many cases one might have 1,000 acres of land but 200 shareholders, which means each shareholder does not have much land.

Reference is made in the IFA presentation to Teagasc giving a breakdown of direct payments for hill farmers of €16,468. I presume a big slice of REPS payment is involved in that.

We know that €3,400is the maximum area-based payment. My experience is that a lot of hill farmers will be talking about a single payment of €2,000 to €3,000 so are they factoring in a huge REPS payment? Presumably, the IFA has the breakdown on that because it looks to me as if there is about €10,000 of REPS payments thrown in there for luck.

We can talk about the Department all we like but GAEC - good agricultural and environmental conditions - is the spectre at the feast. GAEC is a European requirement for the single farm payment. The Department may not mind the condition the hill is in, but if an EU auditor finds that the farm in question, which is in receipt of a payment, is not in GAEC, the payment could be stopped. I understand from the Department that that is the crux of the matter.

I share the witnesses' concerns about the collective agreement, but how will we deal with the European spectre at the feast? We have a lot of work to do to get around how we will square off the GAEC, which involves farmers working together in a commonage, while on the other hand avoiding some imposed collective agreement that is impossible to obtain because there is one awkward person in a commonage. I do not have an easy answer to this question. It might be fairly innocent of us to think that Europe will accept that an individual farmer was not to blame. We must consider this matter.

We are all obsessed about sheep numbers but no other farming sector in the country determines one's stock level. A REPS plan might do so but that is between a farmer and the REPS planner. However, no stock numbers are laid down by the State to get GAEC or any other conditions. Farmers obtain GAEC and are measured on their output. In the case of sheep farming, however, the State is saying what the input must be, and the minimum or maximum input may be wrong. Farmers may be forced out of GAEC whereas if they were left with the responsibility of getting GAEC, they would know what their hills can carry and how the seasons vary as well as knowing a good year from a bad one.

How wedded is the IFA to this concept of arbitrary numbers being built in? If we change the grazing patterns of sheep, it could result in over-grazed and under-grazed sections on the one hill. What would the IFA think of putting the onus back on farmers to get the hills into good condition? They should decide stock numbers and how and where to graze the sheep in order to avoid all the things that have caused problems over the last 30 years. If we all went back 40 years when nobody interfered - neither the Department, Europe nor the United Nations - hills generally were in very good condition. It was only when outsiders started interfering by introducing grants that we got the conditions wrong.

We have been giving in too much on this particular point. I am surprised that the farming organisations are willing, after ten years of trying numbers games, to go along with this very prescriptive number. As a Minister, I purposely did the first de-stocking programme and would have preferred to persist with that method of 30% across the board. I did not say, however, that farmers could not sell over and back. My idea was that the farmers themselves would find a level within hill areas. If a farmer had de-stocked too much, he could buy from a farmer that was still over-stocked. We could get GAEC that way rather than trying to pretend that all these are discrete patches of hill on which sheep graze.

I fully agree with Mr. Bryan on the issue of sheep and cattle breeds. The latter is as big an issue because there are a lot of Charolais crosses in hill areas now. It is important to get that right.

I am a bit baffled by the talk of an environmental management scheme and the approach that, in some way, pillar 2 is the hill man or woman's panacea. If one sets up an agri-environmental scheme that will be an optional REP scheme, but the farmer will not get paid unless the hill is in GAEC, what will that scheme do, therefore, to get the greening and single payments? Before receiving such payments, farmers' land will be required to be in good agricultural and environmental condition, or GAEC.

I am surprised the IFA is going for a concept of some other scheme on another level, which hill farmers will have to go through in order to get their basic farm payments. I would have thought that, in view of the damning figures that hill farmers are losing money in good years, the simple way of resolving this issue would be to give a fair and equitable single payment. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the National Parks and Wildlife Service have made it absolutely clear that, in European terms, high nature value farming is of huge international importance. The EU is very concerned about under-grazing and land abandonment, so hill farming must be profitable if people are going to continue with it. I thought the IFA would demand such measures for hill farmers who must climb mountains up to 2,000 feet high and more in some places. In the MacGillicuddy Reeks - I do not know the height of Carrantuohill-----