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

I thank the officials for coming here today. A number of serious issues were raised. Mr. Dillon mentioned that the Department has received observations on the draft RDP.

Might it be possible for the members of the committee to be given a copy of those observations so we can have some sense of what is going on, or what is in mind at EU level? Mr. Dillon said the Department cannot give us a projected date for when it is likely that this will be completed. Perhaps he can give us two indications. How long does he think it will take the Department to prepare the response? In broad terms, are we talking about a fortnight, a month or six weeks? How long after that will it take to get agreement from the EU so we can have some sense of what is happening? Is it likely to take a month, two months, six months or eight months?

Even though we all use the English word "commonage", I have to say I do not like it because it seems to imply that the land in question is commonly owned. Most land in Ireland, including commonage areas, is not commonly owned. It is not "common" as we might have understood that to mean when they used to play cricket on common areas in village centres in Britain. In other words, we are not talking about a common area in public ownership. In most places, the coimíní, or the commonages as they are called in English, are areas of undivided ownership. If a husband and wife own a piece of land, is it a commonage? If they have an undivided share each, is that a commonage? If two people are joint owners, is that a commonage? If a hill is owned outright, is it being considered a commonage even though it is not a commonage? It is important for us to understand what is being called a commonage. To my knowledge, one never sees the word "commonage" in the folios. One sees references to "undivided share, one fiftieth" and that kind of thing. It is important for us to get a clear understanding of what the officials are talking about.

I have seen it all in my time. I have seen the fetish about over-grazing and I have seen the prescriptions to deal with over-grazing. When I served as Minister, I brought the late Michael O'Toole to the Department to meet representatives of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Mr. O'Toole, who was a soil scientist by profession, had worked for Teagasc for many years. He was also a hill sheep farmer. He had been in charge of the hill sheep station that was run by Teagasc and previously by the Agricultural Institute. He spent five hours warning the officials that if they continued to pursue the prescriptions they were pursuing, they were going to get an under-grazing problem. He said that this problem would not be caused by the farmers, but by the prescription farming that was being prescribed. Needless to say, his warnings fell on deaf ears. The officials carried on regardless and took virtually all the sheep off the mountains in the Maamturks and other areas.

Now that we have moved on from over-grazing to the latest fetish of under-grazing, which we are being told is happening on a massive scale, I think this committee is entitled to information from the Department on the areas that are allegedly under-grazed. I would like to compare those areas with the areas where the two Departments put in the prescriptions and forced the farmers to take away the stock. If my guess is right, the vast amount of under-grazing that the officials are talking about was not caused by farmers who were unwilling to farm the hills or too old to do so - it was caused by the Department's own prescriptions. It would be very unfair to penalise farmers for the outcome of things we had warned about. The idea that farmers are not farming the land - that one will not get enough farmers in all the commonages to put up enough stock to keep them fully grazed - is not my experience. When they come in to see me every week, they ask whether it might be possible for them to put more sheep on the hill. I would be interested to hear Deputy Kyne's experience of this in Connemara. The farmers want to know when the stocking restrictions, which they never wanted, will be lifted. They wanted sheep. Regardless of the amount of money that was given to them, many farmers were very aggrieved about the sheep being taken away in such numbers, particularly in more recent years. The officials need to stop talking in generalities about under-grazing and start giving us the facts. It is important for this Oireachtas committee, the members of which represent the people, to be given that information.

I do not know who came up with the idea under Pillar 1 that a farmer will not get a single farm payment if he or she does not have stock on the commonage area that he or she submits. I will set out a very simple case involving a large commonage area of 300 ha, or 750 acres. If just 30 farmers - this would be quite a small number - in that commonage are farming the lowland, there will be 10 ha per farmer. If we presume that the real stocking level is one ewe per acre - I am talking about a good grass hill, as one would not get such a level on a boggy hill - that is 2.5 ewes per hectare. If the 30 of them have to put their sheep on the hill, there will be 30 flocks of 25 sheep up there. Of course, there are 750-acre commonages with 100 owners who are submitting area aid forms. If the officials do not believe such commonages exist, I can give them examples. I have seen a commonage of 245 acres with 200 owners. The officials can understand how this would affect such a commonage.

My example relates to farmers with 25 ewes each. If the number of farmers in this case was to increase to 60, they would have 12 ewes each over 750 acres. The idea of a farmer chasing around the mountain after 12 sheep that are spread randomly over 750 acres, with another 30 doing the same thing, is farcical. The case I set out involved 30 farmers and 300 ha. This equates to 10 ha and 25 ewes each. If the 30 active farmers could come to an arrangement whereby ten of them could put the sheep up on the hill, and the other farmers would allow them to graze their share for free grass without charge, each guy would get 75 ewes. Chasing around the hill would become a somewhat useful exercise in such circumstances. There would be the exact same number of ewes on the hill, which would be fully stocked. That is basically the way the thing works at the moment. It is not the case that any one of the shares is not being actively farmed. There is a gentlemen's or ladies' agreement between the farmers about who puts up the sheep on all of this land. The idea that it is not kept in good agricultural environmental condition is nonsense. The idea that some other arrangement is reached is equally nonsensical.

I was at a meeting at which somebody suggested that a farmer who is not farming the mountain can claim the single farm payment and lease it to another farmer. That is not going to work because as of now, one gets the single payment when it is given and one lets the other guy graze it. Everybody is happy. The thing is fully stocked and maintained. Why would the person who is getting free use of it, in effect, suddenly start paying a lot of money for it? I do not think that is practical. The upshot of this is that if it is enforced in an area like Connemara, the single farm payments of over half the farmers will be destroyed. That is a simple fact. The Department knows from its own statistics that there are twice as many farmers with cattle only as there are with sheep only or with both cattle and sheep. We know that the cattle do not go to the top of the mountain. We were told at the meeting in Maam Cross that one will have to graze all the land as an active farmer. One will not be covered by putting a few cattle in the lower part of it for a few days each year. In light of what happened with LIPIS, I firmly believe this will be enforced to the letter of the law. I can see GPS-sensitive ear tags being put on the sheep five years from now to make sure they are roaming the whole range.

They stated that one would have to use all the commonage. Allowing that it is a mountain, cattle cannot go to the top of the mountain. Ergo, where there is a cattle-only farm, the Department knows immediately to throw the farmer out of the scheme and not allow him or her claim on his or her commonage.

This is one of the most extraordinary and frightening developments in hill farming in a long time. I am sorry that I have taken a while here but I have been working with hill farmers since I went to Connemara in 1974. As somebody who was sheep farmers' co-operative manager in his early days, I am aggrieved at the way the farmers are being treated.

On Pillar 2, just as we did centrally with the commonage framework plans, my belief is that if one wants to get farmers in hill areas into the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, the minimum requirement is that the State commissions and pays for the plan in consultation with the farmers on each commonage. Let us say all of us are farmers in a commonage, we all have different advisers, we all must agree one adviser and we have to pay for it. If I pay for it because I want to get into GLAS, the Chairman might say he was not interested in getting into GLAS. When I have the plan ready, he might say then that he wants to go into it and he will use my handy plan because he must use it. I believe, therefore, that step number one in this is that there should be one plan, like the commonage framework plan but which would be a GLAS plan developed for the commonages, and if I go to my planner, he or she would buy into that plan.

The second detail we need to know is the extra ideas the Department has. The officials stated that good agricultural and environmental condition, GAEC, applies in terms of single farm payment. One of the questions that is left unanswered, therefore, is the nature of the prescription under the GLAS scheme. What will a farmer have to do over and above GAEC, in other words, graze it correctly? If there are physical changes to the commonage involved, any one shareholder, active or inactive, can stop it. One cannot change anything on a commonage physically without the permission of all. If one ever tried to lock-split a commonage - the Land Commission in the Department will give the officials the lowdown on this - one could not do it without 100% agreement.

On this round, it is stated that if there are 20 shareholders on a commonage, and 15 are claiming shares under the single payment scheme, but only ten of those are actively grazing the land, the 50% requirement to trigger priority access to GLAS is just five farmers. It was stated earlier in this regard, however, that if there are 20 shareholders on a commonage and only ten of those are actively grazing the land at present, there can only be ten farmers claiming the commonage for the single farm payment by the end of 2015. What farmers will be forced to do and what I would do is to go to Maam Cross, buy ten cast ewes and let them off on the mountain. They would disappear to the original mountain, but so be it. I would have them up on the hill to meet the Department's requirements. If I have a small enough share, I can put ten up and let them go wild. What about it? Those sheep will return home. This provision shows the total misunderstanding. How will we get all these ewes into place? How will we get them there? If I am in a commonage and I have not been putting sheep up on the hill, and if I decide I want to put sheep on the hill and none of my neighbours is willing to sell me the sheep, how will I get sheep up there? If I go to Maam Cross mart and buy ewes, they will head off across the mountain a distance of ten or 20 miles back to where they came from but I will be able to show in my census that I put them up there and I can leave the Department officials to try find them. This is totally misguided. To put it frankly, we need to think this one out again. This is a much bigger disaster than the Department appreciates.