Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the last thing Deputy Ó Cuív said, which was that we need to work to ensure farmers get the best price they can for their animals. We have been doing that. We now have the highest price ever being paid for milk. Over the past five or six months, we have had pretty high beef prices also. The way in which we do that is to support farmers, to ensure we have the maximum demand for Irish products, to protect our reputation as we did during the horse meat crisis, and to open up live export markets when we can to provide competition, which we have been doing, with boats going to Libya. Discussions are taking place as to whether we might be able to export live cattle to the UK, because UK prices for beef are the highest in Europe.

We are doing what we can to work the market to ensure Irish produce is sold into premium markets and that Irish farmers get the highest value they can. However, farmers need to respond to that too, with more farmers entering into the beef quality assurance scheme and the lamb quality assurance scheme. Approximately 80% of the beef produced in Ireland is under the quality assurance mark while approximately 50% of sheep and lamb meat is. There is no reason a farmer should not be operating out of that quality assurance scheme. That helps us all to market Irish meat as the best in Europe from the point of view of quality, safety, animal husbandry, environmental controls and all the other things the quality assurance scheme guarantees.

The whole point of having a national reserve is to support new entrants into farming, farmers who have been farming without any payment on what is called naked land who should be eligible for payments in the future, and farmers who may have been ill during the reference year, or were out of action for some other reason, and got a raw deal in terms of their entitlement.

They can make their case and look for a top-up on their existing entitlement. That is the kind of thing the national reserve can do.

I fought really hard to get what is called a flexible greening payment. Ireland was the only country that even thought of this concept initially, but we got strong support once we started selling this approach. If we were to do as the Commission proposed, which is what the Deputy is also proposing - that is, to give the same greening payment to every farmer per hectare - it would not reflect the effort for certain farmers and the incentive that is there for certain farmers to abide by the greening rules. If somebody is operating a low-intensity form of farming on a hillside somewhere, he will essentially have to do nothing to get the greening payment, whereas an intensive dairy, beef or arable farm will require a whole series of things to qualify for a greening payment. It is much more sensible to say to farmers that they will have 30% of their payment held back until they can show that they meet the greening criteria, and then they will get that 30%. This is distinct from having a payment of 70% and then 30% of the average payment across the country assigned as a greening payment to each farmer. Thirty percent of an average payment is between €70 and €80, so for somebody who is on €600 per hectare it is nowhere near 30% of their payment. Therefore, the incentive is not the same for higher earners as it is for lower earners. If somebody had an €80 payment per hectare at the time we were negotiating, the greening payment would be the same as the other base payment because it would be 30% of €270, which is the average payment. I thought it was much more sensible and much simpler for farmers to understand to tell them that 30% of their payment relates to their greening responsibilities and they only get it if they meet those responsibilities. If everybody has the same flat rate payment, then the greening payment is 30% of that average, but if there is a differentiation between higher earners and lower earners based on past productivity and so on, which is what we are proposing for Ireland, then it makes much more sense to have a flexible greening payment because the incentive for farmers to be green is the same regardless of income. If the Deputy has a different view, that is fine. We can talk about it again, but my view is that a flat rate payment would have had a very significant redistributive effect for many farmers, which was something we wanted to avoid. Having a flexible greening payment allows that payment to change over the seven years with the rest of the payment. It is a much more gradual change and farmers will be able to adapt to it more easily.

I could ask the Deputy the question of whether regionalisation and the single farm payment coefficient are off the table. It is an option that is on the list. All options are on the table at the moment. I think it is unlikely that we will go down the regionalisation or the coefficient route, but let us not write things off before we start the consultation process. Some people might feel that we should use those tools. I think it would be very divisive to use either of those tools. One of the reasons we argued so strongly for a gradual redistribution of funds and to limit that redistribution was that we would not have to break the country up into different regions. I do not want people in the west of Ireland, the north west, the south west or south east to be put into categories on the basis of their geography. Instead, I would rather a gradual redistribution at a national level. That has been my preference, but let us hear what people have to say in the public consultation process. Some people may feel we should use a coefficient in mountainous areas, but personally I would need persuasion on that. The less we divide the country into different areas and payments, the less divisive this debate will be. Now that we have got our approximation redistribution model, I think it is less likely we will have to do that. If we chose the Commission's approach, which some people have advocated-----