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

I thank Mr. Enright and Mr. Downey for the comprehensive presentations they made. It is fair to say that both of them have quite a bit in common - volatility, 2020 targets, capital allowances, stamp duty, investment in co-operatives and so on. I will not go through them all because we would be here all day if we went into every issue. It seems that volatility is a major issue for the upper end of farming. Again, the idea that one puts the money aside and then averages it seems to make sense. I think that is a reasonable idea. It would be good if we could find common cause across farming organisations as to what the requirements are.
A total of 60% of farmers have an off-farm income. Off-farm income is a very valid issue and must be looked at in one form or another. It should depend on what percentage of one's income is off-farm, but the idea that if one is out if one has any off-farm income does not make any sense.
I hear what the witnesses are saying with regard to capital loans and stock relief. It will be a huge issue for the dairy sector if there is to be expansion, because 18,000 out of 120,000 farmers are engaged in dairying, which is about 15%. I will home in on a few points. In respect of the 120,000 farmers, do the witnesses have any data between them regarding how many of them have a taxable income? I am not talking about a farm income. We must take into account the fact that in most cases, people look at their family income and take the farm income. Some people in this country seem to be against people having mixed sources of income. It is fair to say that if we are going to keep rural populations in many areas of the country, a large proportion of the current farming population would not make a full living out of farming and never will. The number of farmers would fall very low if they were all to be full-time farmers. For many farmers, the other big advantage of having a mixture of farm income and possibly some other income - a lot of farming does not take 40 hours per week - is that it helps to deal with the volatility issue, because if one thing is up, the other thing might be down and vice versa. I certainly saw much better farming in my own area when people got employment, because they could invest in the farms, they knew they were going to stay and they could take a much longer view if they had a steady off-farm job. Therefore, I would be very interested if anybody had information on taxable incomes. What is the taxable income - zero to €30,000, €30,000 to €60,000, and so on? The second issue, which was raised by the IFA the other day, is the fact we must figure out how many of those farmers do not have a PAYE income. The reason I want to know is that we need to calculate how much it would cost to give earned income - self-employed income - what is now the employee tax-free allowance.

Compared to what it was in the past, the employee allowance is massive. At €1,650 of a tax credit, it is the same amount as the individual allowance. If we are to get some sense of the difference it would make and the number it would impact, we must remember that social welfare pensions and carer's allowance attract the PAYE tax credit. If someone is getting a contributory old age pension or an invalidity pension they get the PAYE allowance, but for some reason if they are on farm assist or disability allowance they do not get it because it is not taxable income. I would be interested to hear what the cost would be if we were to say it was earned income, as was the case previously, rather than unearned income.

I am particularly interested in that because I have long been a proponent of much higher compulsory PRSI for the self-employed in return for benefits, invalidity pension in particular, which Deputy Pringle said was coming down the track. I favour that because it will force people to protect themselves against a future event. Farmers are vulnerable to accidents and so on and to wind up with no income other than a means tested income as a result of an accident or becoming ill can be a huge hit. One way of compensating for that would be to try to deal with this issue for the purely self-employed. I would be interested to see the breakdown in that regard.

Regarding the pay and file dates, it appears to me that the pay date has to remain, and we have been getting vibes that it will remain, but would it cause a problem for self-employed people if the file date was brought forward, which they need because the budget was brought forward? I understand the argument from the official side is that the data needs to be in by the end of August to ensure that when the budget is done in mid-October, they will know what the income for the year is, which allows them better guess the tax take, even if they do not get the cash until the end of October. Are they saying pay and file dates should remain or that the pay date should remain the same? Is one a red line issue or are they both red line issues? We should get some sense of that today. They would probably win on the pay; the file date appears to be a much greater challenge.

The IFA representative mentioned a number of issues to do with the CAP. In terms of putting any reasonable capital programme in place, they will find it hard to spend it because by the time they get a scheme up and running, people apply and get the work done, and they are always much slower to do that than they anticipate, it will become a cash cow for the Department. That might be useful for the Department as a cash cow but we must consider that only 62% of the Leader money from the last CAP was spent, and we are in the last mile. It is vitally important to make the scheme available and have a nominal amount, but the actual cash drawdown in 2015, and I know this from endless schemes for which I had responsibility, will be relatively small.

I presume the €52 million for the beef data and genomic schemes will be provided. I understand from the Department that it will announce GLAS and it will then give farmers a certain amount of time to submit the applications, and in that respect we will have problems in commonage areas and so on. There will be a closing day and all the online applications will have to be in by that date. The Department will then have to process and validate the 30,000 applications. My understanding from the Department is that the 30,000 applicants will go to the starting line on the same day. We have an announcement date. People have to be given reasonable time to line up all the planners in all the farm circumstances, for example, where they get 50% agreement on the shareholdings, commonages and so on. They all get the line. They have to be approved, and then allowed proceed. My understanding is that if that were to happen on 1 September, which is an easy figure to work out, they will pay one third of a year's GLAS payment in December. If it happens on 1 October, they pay one quarter, a sixth on 1 November, and one twelfth on 1 December. Obviously, if they do it on 1 June they will get half their payment.

The timelines on this are critical. At this point we come to a conundrum because if my memory serves me right, in the AEOS 3, the farmers asked for more time because there was pressure on planners. In this case we are talking about five times the number in a group. What is the timeline on this? This goes back to what was said about income averaging and PAYE income. One of the big problems now is that people's incomes are collapsing. In terms of anyone dependent on REPS payment, their income is collapsing. When that is taken out of the net income, after all the expenses, it is greatly reducing. A fair number of these people are not able to collaborate because all of them have farm incomes. I would like to hear the witness's comments on that. My guess is that no matter what promises they get farmers will be screaming for extensions to allow them submit all their plans but if the system gets clogged up with planners and all the extra requirement in the plans, they might be the cause of their own delay. I can understand that if they are under pressure but we will wind up with a situation where the Department has to process all of that.

I do not see a huge amount of GLAS money coming forward next year and if that happens, does the Department have a plan B in that regard? Will we enhance the genomic scheme or do something for farmers next year to try to keep the cash flow? Otherwise, we will be facing a big problem. I could make many more comments but I will leave it at that.