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

Dr. Kevin Smyth has said that there is an undergrazing problem. I have long experience of dealing with farmers and all they have ever told me is that they want to put sheep on the hill and they were allowed to do so. Let us resolve this once and for all. Can Dr. Smyth give me and Deputy Kyne the maps of the areas in Connemara that he believes are undergrazed? If he gives us those, we will be able to compare those with the commonage framework plans and we will know the cause of the problem once and for all. That is what is called evidence-based decision-making. I would want to see the evidence before I would believe there is great deal of that land that has been abandoned by farmers. If we want to ensure there is adequate grazing of the commonage, it is much more likely we would do it in a systematic and better way if a smaller number of farmers were putting a larger number of sheep on the hills. If we force people to put small numbers of sheep on the hills, they will not be able to provide the care for the area that would be provided if there were a big flock of sheep on the mountain.

I will cite a typical example. I am sure Deputy Kyne knows Oorid in Recess. If one checks this commonage in the Land Registry, one will note it comprises 1,753 acres. There are 80 farmers with a stake in it, which works out at approximately 22 acres a head. Dr. Smyth can work out the number of sheep involved. If it is set out in acres, 1.5 hectares would work out at 2.5 and there would be another 1.25.

That is 3.75. Each one is 20 acres. If I divide that by four, I need something like 5 to 7 sheep over 1,753 acres, if they all take up the option to avail of the grant. That is not management, it is chaos. It is not workable.

I cannot understand why the Department of Agriculture does not say it wants x number of sheep on a designated hill, for example 500 ewes on a hill, or if it is a very good hill there might be a ewe to the acre. Presumably the number of ewes will relate to the quality of the land. Blanket bog would take fewer ewes. Say the Department decides it wants 500 ewes on a piece of land. Why can't it tell the farmers that it wants there to be 500 ewes there collectively and it does not care which farmer technically owns the ewes? Then we would get a very well-managed situation where a smaller number will look after the flock well, and will manage the sheep across the range. If the Department is forcing people with five or 10 sheep up onto the hill just to keep their area-based payment, they are not going to be able to manage them over the range. How can five to 10 ewes be managed over that kind of range? It is not practical.

I am appalled at the continued total lack of understanding of the reality of this. I was trying to explain it in Maam Cross. The next problem, of course, is that if we have under-grazing, for example if there were only 200 ewes on the land, it will take a long time to breed up. A farmer will only get 70 lambs out of 100 ewes and only half of those will be female, so that is 35, and of the 100 ewes, 10 will die every year on average, so no we only have 25. Even keeping all of the ewe lambs, which are the profitable ones to sell, the flock can only be increased by 25 ewes per hundred per annum. That is all that can be done. If a farmer wants to go from 100 to 200 it is going to take at least four years. There is a problem here.

Do we know how many hill farmers are on the commonage implementation committee? These are people who have real experience on hills.

Did the farming organisations not warn the Department that this would be chaos in the mountains before the rural development programme went in and all of this was drawn up? In fairness to the IFA they have been vociferous in places like Connemara, saying that this is unworkable.