Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It seems to be based very much along the lines of an expanded GLAS model, where one is dealing with a very natural way of dealing with the land. One of the issues in my part of the country is that the soil is poor and the ground is very heavy and wet. Farming is limited to suckling and sheep farming and it is hard to do anything else outside that. There are good veins of land everywhere, and there are little bits of places where one can do a bit of dairying, but largely it is poor.

It boils down to how one derives an income from it which is why I am interested in scale. Most farmers in the west or the north would be on much smaller farms than what is being discussed here. I was interested to hear the last group before the committee speaking about two families being able to take an income off the farm. In my part of the country, one family is barely able to manage that never mind two. That is the bottom line. The witnesses seem to say that while there are all these advantages to the environment that it still creates that return. I am interested in the volume of return, particularly in marginal land, where one starts off from a difficult position.