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

I am sorry; I was at another meeting and could not attend earlier.

There is a great deal of sense in the various points the delegates have raised. I would like to address my colleagues and the delegates on the single farm payment issue. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has produced figures for me based on productivity, excluding tillage farmers. What they show is that the farmers receiving more than €400 or €500 per hectare are less than twice as productive as those receiving less than €250 per hectare. If the minimum payment was fixed at €200 for those now receiving under €250, it should be less than €400 for those now receiving €500 or more.

That brings me to the issue of what is an active farmer. A farmer rang me last night. Like many farmers around where I live, he farms 2,000 ft. above sea level. If one does not have to be active to do this, one does not have to be active to do anything. It is not easy to get a tractor to the top of the mountains where he is located. I think we will park the issue of what is an active farmer. As I said, on the production aspect, there is no factual basis to the argument being made by the Irish Farmers Association on production because the figures provided by the Senator's own Minister give the lie to it. Unless the Senator wants to take up the figures with him, I have to go by whatever figures he gives me and they are the production figures.

To return to the issue of hill farming, it seems everybody wants to have a slice of the hills and to have the hill farmer keep the hills in the way they want them kept, but it seems nobody wants to pay for keeping them in the way they want them to be kept. The hill walker wants to walk on the hills and I am all for hill walking. I was a great promoter of hill walking through Comhairle na Tuaithe which I set up. However, I recognise that people walking the hills of Ireland are walking on private land. The ecologists want to have a slice of the hills and want us to keep them in a fancy way to preserve all the heathers, the grouse and everything else. In return for grants, the agriculturalists also want to have access to the hills and want to know what we are producing on them. We should put down a clear marker. If we want people farming on the hills, they will have to be paid. They have to have a livelihood, directly or indirectly, from which there is no getting away. If we close one door to them, we will have to open another because the public good demands that the hills be kept in good order.

I was very interested in the delegates' comments on sheep and the manner in which the nature of hill sheep farming had been changed by some of the great ideas people had come up with such as taking sheep off the hills in the winter, feeding ewe lambs near the bottom during the winter and so on. When I was Minister, I recall coming to Dublin with the late Michael O'Toole who worked for a long time for Teagasc in respect of something about which some of the hill men might not have known. I spent three hours trying to persuade Dúchas and the National Parks and Wildlife Service that the rote destocking of hills and the changes it was forcing on the way hill sheep farmers did their business would change the grazing pattern on the hills and create both under and overgrazed sections on the same hill.

I am interested in teasing out this issue. I am not from the hills, but I have been working with hill sheep farmers for a long time. At one time I was a hill sheep farmers' co-operative manager and at peak, we rented 1,000 acres of land. While I did not engage in day-to-day farming - I had people to do this - I still had ultimate responsibility for it. It appears as though sheep are no different from cats and I always used to define what we were doing as the cat-at-the-back-door syndrome. I have a cat at home which will sit on the window until it receives one's attention. Moreover, it knows to go to the back door when it is hungry and it gets to feed there. Of course, the cat's nature was not to do this. It's nature was to forage widely over a territory to get its food until human beings changed the nature of the cat. The cat kept coming to the back door because after a while, it twigged that this was where the food was. My understanding is that if one continues to change the nature of how one feeds sheep, by bringing them inside in the winter or whatever else, they get it into their heads that that is where the food is and the way in which they graze the hills will change radically. Will it be necessary to go back and start breeding new sheep that will not be kept in and not fed on the low part of a hill? Will it be necessary to let nature take its course if the objective is to have the whole of the range of the hill grazed in a much more even pattern? This seems to be becoming an increasingly major issue in that no matter how much one destocks, if one continues to follow this pattern, one will continue to have the same worn section where the sheep will continue to graze.

The second question is whether, as the people from the Burren have advocated, farming and prescriptions for hill sheep farmers should be based on the outcome, not the inputs. In other words, the tendency is for Departments to tell people they can keep so many sheep, can put so many of them on a hill in the winter or can keep them in for this or that number of days, irrespective of the weather. We actually take the farmers and their inherited knowledge spanning hundreds of years out of the equation and substitute it with rote and prescriptions on a piece of paper. Should we instead tell them that we seek to have the land kept in a particular order but that we do not care how they do it because they know their job? Should we tell them that we do not care on what dates they put sheep up and down on a hill because what we will measure is the condition of the hill and the way they leave it?

Third, I am interested in the delegation's suggestion this payment should be given, as well as an agri-environment options scheme, AEOS, payment, which raises a series of questions. On a recent visit to Brussels I found that they were not clear on it, but perhaps the Minister might provide clarity tomorrow in this regard. My understanding had been that to comply with good farming and agri-environmental conditions, one would be obliged to comply with the commonage framework plan. Put in simple English, my understanding, although those in Brussels seem to think otherwise, was that to receive one's single farm payment, one would be obliged to comply with the commonage framework plan. My understanding of the next round of the AEOS was that it was much more likely to comprise the kinds of thing the delegates have listed than its past format which, in the main, was a payment for destocking hills. That is how we worked it in all cases. The people in County Wicklow were very lucky because they experienced less destocking than those in the west. I refer to how the process was worked out and what they actually were getting on average. Therefore, with regard to the double payment principle in the European Union, I wonder how practical this really is. However, I agree that the delegates must be paid.

My final issue pertains to active and inactive farmers. My understanding is that farmers in County Wicklow have collops or, in other words, certain rights to put certain numbers of sheep on hills as opposed to the position in the west where one has an undivided share of a hill and everyone owns it. It is only a subtle difference, but I presume that were I to take a hill in County Wicklow on which, for example, there were 100 shares, 33 might be completely dormant and not claimed for in any area aid application, that a further one third might be held by farmers who claimed but did not keep sheep on the hill, while the remainder would keep sheep on it. In this example, the second group actually would claim the hill as being part of their farm because it is part of the farm under the area aid scheme, while they farm the low land. One must recognise that there are farmers who will farm their farms but who will not feel up to all of the additional work the delegates have laid out. The same problem in respect of maintenance arose when the waymarked way scheme was being devised, as some farmers could not maintain their section of the waymarked way. They might not have been in a physical condition to so do because all of us will age and succession can be a problem on farms. It does not mean that they cannot farm, but they cannot do this kind of work.

This goes back to a wider vision I had of rural Ireland. It is a more communautairevision than the individualistic way we approach everything today. The vision was that in a rural community such as west Wicklow and the mountains, for those farmers who would not feel up to doing such work, one would employ the young farmers on the rural social scheme to do the work for them. One would get the work done through the rural social scheme, which would mean that the young farmers would have the guarantee of a fixed income through the aforementioned scheme for 19 hours work per week. Moreover, they would also have a profit from the hill farm because nowadays, if one is participating in the farm assist schme, one is working 100% for the Department of Social Protection. Unfortunately, the European Union has not got this far in its thinking on farm subsidies and so on, but my idea was that taking together the rural social scheme, the fact one could build one's family home on one's farm - it would be a little cheaper to build than a house one might buy - and one's farm, one could have a good, comfortable lifestyle for a family. In this way, one would not be dependent on 100% of the people being capable of doing all of the additional work the delegates want to have done. The idea is to do this work for those who cannot do it for themselves by using young farmers. Young farmers would be given a supplementary income in order that they would be encouraged to stay in their home place and farm the land. Do the delegates envisage this as being part of their vision?

My final point is that I saw an area being changed utterly. I acknowledge that it is hard to be a full-time farmer on hill land, unless one has an awful lot of it, but we must have that land farmed. We changed that area with the concept of having a modest job and the farm income supplementing each other to give a family income. This created stability and kept families intact, thereby allowing them to rear children and live in comfort. How would this fit into the delegates' vision of a future for farming in County Wicklow? It is a little more complicated than the direct payments because it also states the social welfare code or rather, through these work schemes, the rural social scheme has a valid part to play in creating sustainable, viable farming in upland areas.