Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We will come back to that in a moment. I want to make one or two other points. I notice in the Department's report, under land mobility measures such as the early retirement and installation aid payment schemes, that the Department paid out €10 million in 2014 on the early retirement scheme. This decreased to €7 million in 2015. Obviously, some of the people availing of the scheme are getting the State pension and, consequently, the payment from Mr. O'Driscoll's Department decreases if they clock into that. I wish to link and relate this to a fact sheet Mr. O'Driscoll sent us on Irish agriculture for January 2017 which refers to farm structure data in Ireland. The fact sheet refers to 139,000 farm holdings and an average farm size of 32.5 ha. It details the proportion of family farms held by age and shows that 6% of farms are held by people under 35 years of age.

It states 53% are held by people over 55 years of age. Therefore, 41% of farms are held by people in the 35 to 55 years age group. Will Mr. O'Driscoll drill down into those figures and send us information relating to the total farmed land in the country for that age group? I am seeking data not by the number of farms but by farmed land.

The figures could mask the situation. While there may be a high percentage of farm owners who are elderly, this might not correspond to the amount of farmed land held by elderly people. Many older farmers have land below the average farm size. It would be useful for us. The figures would be preferable to those for farm holdings, because they do not tell us how much of the farming land in the country is held by the various age cohorts. I do not expect that Mr. O'Driscoll would have the figures here and now.