Mr. Joseph McCrohan:

It is very important to tie farmers into rural development projects. The rural social scheme was probably the brainchild of that. We have now tied them into maintaining walkways very successfully. We hope to tie them into maintaining the greenway in Cahirciveen. The council has put forward a proposal on that. It will be the first in the country where farmers will be meeting the cyclists and cleaning the greenways and keeping it in order. The same needs to continue with all rural development projects where farmers have an input into the projects from the get go. That is very important.

If we continually lose people from the farming community, if they move away from the deeply rural areas those areas will be taken over by noxious weeds and forestry and various other things and will be denuded of people. Once we lose people, once the lights go out in valleys it is very hard to switch them on again. The rural development companies need to work more intensively with farmers and with Teagasc. Teagasc staff numbers have been on hold for the past few years and the deeply rural areas do not have the level of service provided by Teagasc staff going to the houses to meet the farm families. That is a role the rural development countries need to move in on, in conjunction with Teagasc and other State agencies, to keep as many families thriving and vibrant in those rural communities as possible. Without those families the rural schools will suffer. There will be no need for the post office because there will no one there to post a letter. Everything dwindles once the cohort of people that has always been in the rural areas is lost.

Visitors who come to stay in rural areas want to meet the rural people, the people who grew up in the area and who lived there, whether the huntsmen or the farmers or whoever. There will be no beef industry in Ireland if the calves are not born. They are born on the western seaboard. One can talk about Brexit or beef barons but unless the man gets up in the morning to calve the cow there will be no beef industry. There will be no beef industry on the east coast. The resources are not being put into those farmers, those who have to get up in the middle of the night to calve the cows or to put the cow back in calf. That has to be done too and she has to be checked to see is she ready to back in calf. A lot of work needs to be done. It is grand to say the farmer must have an off-farm job and I understand that but as Deputy Fitzmaurice said, a farmer needs to have three or four irons in the fire. He cannot just be beef farming or suckling because he cannot depend on the Irish meat factories to make a living. He will have to have the rural social scheme again. He will have to have jobs at Enterprise, Fexco, Liebherr or wherever.