Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the officials from the Department. We are having a long session here on what is a hugely important issue. A large amount of land is affected across a number of counties.

The Department officials state this scheme is successful because of the number of applicants and that there is general welcome for it among farmers. That is not the case. Farmers are applying for this scheme because it is the only show in town and it is better than no show. That is the way farmers are looking at it. They are applying for scheme but they are not satisfied with it. Farmers feel it does not compensate them for the designation which completely devalued their land. It goes nowhere near doing so. Farmers are applying for the scheme because they might as well try to get some funding for the hardship they have been burdened with.

The officials were kicking to touch as regards the responsibility for designation lying at the National Park and Wildlife Service's door. Whoever determines the designation, as has been said to us already here this evening, if farmers had known what hardship they would endure and the restrictions that would be placed on them, they would have fought vigorously against the designation in 2007. A fairly reasonable scheme was put in place at that stage where farmers could avail of reasonable compensation for the designation but that scheme did not last too long. It was closed very quickly.

It is not fair to discuss GLAS and the hen harrier together. We parked GLAS and put it to one side. GLAS is a scheme that was brought in with environmental requirements attached and it should have nothing to do with the designation of land. We must divorce GLAS completely from this. All farmers in the country can apply for GLAS. I accept that there are top ups on GLAS for those with hen harrier land but we divorced the two schemes from each other.

We want to hear from the Department and we will judge this scheme as follows. The barometer will be that a scheme put in place will restore the value of the land within the designated areas. As has been said, we are talking about 160,000 hectares, 57,000 hectares of which is agricultural. It is a significant amount of land. We heard in the presentations where land for sale in designated areas is not attracting any bids. It has completely devalued.

There are 4,000 farmers who are demanding rightly that we put in place a scheme that will give them proper compensation for the designation and restrictions that are imposed on them. This €25 million goes nowhere near doing that. Whether it is the National Park and Wildlife Service, the Commission or the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the responsibility is clearly on us. In my view these farmers are being discriminated against. There were court cases talked about here earlier in the day. Before I came into this House, I was involved in farmer politics. In my time, I have never seen a scheme introduced that totally took away the capital value of an asset as this designation did. While this scheme is being applied for by farmers, and any money coming in the door as a result of the designation is welcome to them, it is just not good enough.

At the end of the day, it adds insult to injury to talk about the results where some of the payment is dependent on where the hen harrier nests because the farmer has no control over that. If the farmer is lucky enough that a few of the birds decide to nest on his land, he will get an extra payment. That is just not acceptable.

While this scheme is a start and it is the first time there has been recognition in a number of years of a scheme for hen harrier land, it is far from what is needed. We will have to go back to the drawing board. As I stated, the barometer will be that we have a scheme in place. Whatever the amount per hectare, if some of the restrictions were taken away that would impinge on what the payment per hectare needs to be.

The restriction of this blanket ban on forestry is one of the places to start. The evidence shows that this blanket ban is not good for the hen harrier population. That would be one of the steps to start to restore the value of land. The other will be a proper level of compensation per hectare. That is where we need to start and that is what we need to deliver on. Unfortunately, this scheme will not do that. Measuring the scheme by the amount of farmers who apply for it is something I do not want to hear mentioned again because the hen harrier farmers are applying for this scheme out of desperation, not because they approve of it.