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

My first question concerns climate, agriculture and the targets for reducing the carbon footprint. From negotiations to date, how much is the Irish cattle herd at risk because of climate change proposals? Is the Council of agriculture Ministers working to ensure that we continue to produce beef in the countries that can do it most carbon-efficiently and that there is a rebalancing of the carbon targets to take this into account?

Could Mr. O'Driscoll give us some measure of the impact of the Russian ban on EU agricultural products? Has he any idea of the potential risk of agriculture being used in other international disputes? Could the EU get retaliatory action from other important countries involved in foreign policy issues that we do not agree with? If China was to do something we did not like, is there a risk that we could get into an agriculture war because of Tibet or something similar? Has any risk analysis been done in developing all these new markets? How much are we now at risk of these retaliatory wars, particularly with regard to countries such as China, whose human rights record is not exactly perfect, or the Middle East countries?

Mr. O'Driscoll discussed the milk quota and the superlevy. Has he any idea how this is going to work? Can we take it that there will be no interest charged to farmers? Can he give us some detail on how this will work in layman's terms? Maybe he could also outline the logic of the European Union imposing this superlevy when it knew that forever-and-a-day quotas were gone. How is it that common sense did not prevail and that the countries who at least wanted the superlevy ameliorated this year made zero ground on the issue? Deferring a debt does not reduce the debt; it will just be there as a debt on the balance sheet.

With regard to the agricultural trade negotiations, we are talking about the end of 2015. The impression given, particularly by the Government, seems to be that in the TTIP negotiations, agriculture might be an unfortunate consequence of getting this much greater deal. I do not understand the logic of saying that when we bring down the barriers, we will get extra trade because that means the consumer is spending more money, unless we are taking the trade from other countries. The normal logic of free trade is that everyone consumes more but, of course, that is not very good from an ecological point of view. I am always a little puzzled that on the one hand, we are talking about climate change while on the other hand, we are saying we need consumers to buy more, even if they do not really need these things.

To focus on agriculture, how certain is the Department that it can defend small-scale European and Irish agriculture from the mega-scale, much less regulated American agriculture, and that the "industrial interest" will not trump the Irish agricultural interest in these TTIP negotiations? It would seem that even within this country - we are not the biggest industrial country in the world - the industrial interest just wants to steamroll this through and there is a brushing aside of the agricultural interest. I would be very interested in what might happen in that regard.

Unfortunately, I did not get the chance to print this document sent to us yesterday until today as Monday is always a busy day. It refers to the simplification of CAP. My God. When the single farm payment came in, it was meant to be a simplification in the sense that the farmer would get the payment and there would be a disadvantaged area payment and a REP scheme and life would be simple forever. Now a suckler cow farmer would want to be in six schemes to try to get money out of it. Who is at fault? It is the farm organisations, the Department and Europe. We never seem to get it into our heads that if there is a finite pot, creating more schemes does not increase the pot; it just means one has to apply for more schemes to get the same money.

That is a universal rule people seem to ignore. It is like creating and destroying matter. The pot from Europe is finite. We had a brilliant example of this in the last week. This CAP, in particular, has an element to it which means an awful lot of the money will actually go to consultants, professionals and vets and not to farmers. We saw that with the beef schemes, where €500 was going to the planner and €750 to the farmer.

With regard to the genomics scheme, the witnesses might explain to us how and why a payment per animal suddenly become a payment per hectare. Why is it that, if one joins for six years, one cannot get out of it? Why is it that, irrespective of anything, it has to involve four-star or five-star bulls? Why is it this and why is it that? An awful lot of farmers have looked at this and said: " It is six years of this and if anything goes wrong, I cannot reduce my herd or change anything." We know a lot of farmers are older and they are being told to please keep away. It is a classic example of how complicated we are making everything.

I think this is quite simple. If the factories were consistently paying premium prices for premium cattle, the farmers would do whatever needed to be done in order to get the premium cattle at the premium prices and they would find their own way to do it. They would not need all of these regulated schemes, with paperwork and penalties, to achieve it.

What is happening is that many of these schemes are based on a false market. The Department cannot get the factories to deliver on the price so it tries to get the improvements even though the factories are paying a flat rate, because it thinks it would be a good idea if there were better cattle and it knows the factories are not willing to pay the premium price for the premium animals all the time. However, we who are dealing with farmers have found out that all it does is fill up our clinics with all sorts of weird and wonderful situations where people are penalised.

With regard to the LPIS, twice in the last week farmers came to me with maps produced by the Department in the last year under the LPIS where there was no, or a very minor, penalty. In both cases the Department has reviewed some of the land again on a Bing map and there are now 100% penalties. Again, farmers find that they do not know what will arrive in the post from one day to another. They think they are in the clear, they have the map and the map states what is the reference area, but suddenly they get another map. I favour simplification, but the programme of simplification here does not appear to be farmer-centred. It appears to be bureaucrat-centred and does not deal with the issues of simplification which the farmers I deal with require. They are getting caught on the rules all of the time and a genuine error is mortally penalised.

I welcome the reference to examining the issue of small discrepancies in areas for small farmers. I hope there is a quick fix on that.