Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for being late. Do the witnesses envisage a comprehensive package coming for young farmers? A whole-of-Europe approach to the decline in young farmers is probably required. Is it here or in Brussels that it will be handled? The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine's definition of a young farmer is 40 years of age or under, whereas for Revenue it is 35 years when transferring land. Could that be tied up and could the organisations work together? The witnesses might be able to inform us about the incentive for the older farmer to get a retirement scheme such as existed previously. Is there something on the horizon in this regard? There is a category in Ireland called the forgotten farmer. Those are people who missed out on payments but who were under 40. They were not involved in the reference years or they had low numbers in the reference years. My understanding is that the Department and Brussels have cleared the hurdles for those individuals to be included. Are they being included now? Will farmers who started farming over the past five to ten years and who would not have received any payments be included in it? Are there initiatives for the family farm or will it be up to the member state to decide if it will front-load to protect the family farm?

Will there be a proper environmental scheme? The witnesses have pointed out that Mercosur is a bad deal for Irish beef farmers. Will supports come in for suckler cows? Is there any environmental proposal in Europe for those farmers farming in designated areas who are not able to farm in the same way as other, undesignated areas with fewer restraints? Is there a separate package, although not one outside the CAP, for the environment that will help those farmers?

The witnesses spoke about the definition of a farmer. Is that defined under the CAP or do world trade agreements decide this? Will we still have the situation where people might sell the grass off land and have a good single farm payment? Will there be a stocking rate or such that a farm will have to have for the whole year, rather than having donkeys for five to seven months and still being covered? I acknowledge that is for schemes such as areas of natural constraint, ANC. My understanding is that for the CAP at present, one does not have to have anything at all on one's land, which is unusual. We will probably be told that under world trade agreements, one cannot promote farming. One would imagine that we could have some minimum requirement, such as we had for the ANC. On the definition of a farmer, in many farms around the country, a farmer has to work on the farm part-time. Do the witnesses see problems coming from that? If Europe proposed that, it would basically blow out many family farms.