Brian Ó Domhnaill (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the delegation and thank them for the very comprehensive presentation. There has been much work and research done on the area. I come from Donegal, which is also a county of hills with lots of commonage grazing and hill grazing areas. We have had our own difficulties, particularly with destocking on the hills and the dreadful fires in May 2011, when large parts of the county were burned. Houses were almost lost and we came very close to loss of human life. Thankfully, that did not happen.

I will be as brief as possible. County Wicklow has extensive Natura land, including SACs and SPAs and the national park. The combined SACs and SPAs amount to 60,000 ha, which is a very large expanse of land. We have had difficulties in Donegal with the designation of SPAs in particular and the total lack of consultation with landowners and farmers prior to decisions. I ask if the council has any view on the designations made in Wicklow or the manner in which those designations have taken place. It is the responsibility of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. This may be a tangential point but I ask if the council is of the view that designations should be the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, given the affinity between landowners and that Department, rather than of a Department that has no direct link with landowners.

I wholeheartedly agree with the council's proposal. The commonage framework directive and destocking on hills have come about as a result of EU policy - for example, the Natura sites, SPAs and SACs. Hill farmers have to undertake restrictive farming practices and they must be compensated, because the overall allocation or the pot of money available to this country under the transfers from Europe, between Pillars 1 and 2, is about €1.6 billion. The reason we are getting that pot of money is that we have a substantial element of restricted farming and SAC and SPA lands. The farmers concerned play an active part in protecting the Natura sites, which means we are in receipt of a bigger chunk of funding from Europe. There has to be a compensation element built in. The current compensation includes the disadvantaged area payment. However, I am always fascinated at the manner in which the disadvantaged area scheme is administered. For example, people with the best land in the country were in receipt of disadvantaged area payments while the guys on the hills were getting only a few euro extra per hectare for the poorest land in the country with all sorts of restrictions on stocking. That was wrong.

There are potentially several ways of dealing with this and I support the delegates' suggestions in this regard.

Agreement is expected to be reached soon on a renewal of the Common Agricultural Policy and there has been a great deal of discussion by farmers throughout the country of what it might mean for them. My colleague, Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív, and I do not wholly subscribe to the argument that Pillar 2 will offer a solution to all of the difficulties being faced by farmers on marginal land. The largest element of change will come under Pillar 1 which accounts for some €1.2 billion of funding. Pillar 2, on the other hand, will offer only some €450,000, a sum which could diminish between now and the end of the year as a consequence of the current fiasco with the drawdown of Leader funding. That delay could have knock-on connotations for the drawdown of funding under the new CAP.

The difficulty is that we do not yet know what will be involved under Pillar 2. We do know that there will be a rural development aspect, for example, and that suckler cow quotas and the disadvantaged areas scheme will have to be accommodated, but it is difficult to ascertain how much money will be left over for schemes such as the delegates are proposing. Funding for some of their proposals such as measure 1 which suggests a per hectare payment would more suitably come under Pillar 1. Some of the other measures could come under Pillar 2, but there must be an up-front payment, particularly for farmers on lands which could be described as marginal or hilly. That up-front payment should come from the Pillar 1 budget which is three times that of Pillar 2. The Irish Farmers Association has maintained that the Pillar 2 budget is the appropriate pot from which farmers on poorer land in the west and places such as County Wexford and County Wicklow can receive their top-up payment. That is somewhat disingenuous. Why should farmers on marginal lands struggle to obtain funds under Pillar 2 when the owners of large farms are getting the benefit in any case as a result of the restrictive farming practices being undertaken by farmers on peripheral land?

The scheme the delegates are proposing is an excellent one, but I could not support a situation where it would be implemented only in County Wicklow. We would love to steal parts of it for implementation in other parts of the country. I am sure the delegates will take that as the compliment it is intended to be. There is not a huge amount of money involved, with the delegates indicating that some 350 to 400 farmers in County Wicklow would be eligible. There is work for the committee to do in discovering how many might be eligible and the cost of including all of them on a nationwide basis. Hill land is one of our greatest natural assets and farmers are best placed to protect it. They must, however, be compensated for that work and the way to do so is via a cheque in the post. It goes without saying there must be conditions and we must ensure the work is being done and the money spent properly. Identifying the source of income will be key.

My main concern is that this worthy proposal might suffer because of diminishing funds under Pillar 2. I urge the delegates to be careful of this. The argument needs to be made that some of the Pillar 1 funding should be allocated for schemes such as this. That would benefit thousands of farmers, particularly along the west coast from counties Cork and Kerry right up to County Donegal. It would allow people to stay on the land and protect it. We can talk about productivity and so on, but in the absence of such support, we will see in five or ten years time people leaving the land because there is no source of income. They will move to urban areas or leave these shores, leading to a significant rural decline. In fact, this is already happening throughout the country, with young people leaving the family farm because it does not provide a sustainable income.

The delegates' proposal in respect of the Wildlife (Amendment) Act 2000 is a no brainer for me. It makes no sense to have two burning policies on a small island like ours. I met a delegation from the North last night to discuss wind energy. There is a strong case to be made for an all-island policy in terms of planning and so forth in that area. Likewise, a common-sense approach is required on the issue of burning and it should be possible to work out an island-wide policy. There is no difference between the hills around Maghera and those in County Wicklow or County Donegal; why, therefore, would there be two burning policies? It makes absolute sense to have a co-ordinated approach on issues such as this.