Mr. Tim Cullinan:

Senator Lombard made some excellent points. I am clear on the definition of an "active farmer". It is anybody who works on a farm. That is very important. The Senator referred to "armchair farmers", a term I do not like. We have to look at this and be serious about it. We have one budget now. If a farmer is at the point in his or her life where he or she decides not to farm any longer and to lease out his or her entitlements, and if that continues on an ongoing basis, we have to look at that. People have worked hard to earn those entitlements but there needs to be a trading system whereby the farmer could sell those entitlements. The Government has to step up as well from a capital allowance point of view. The money received for the sale of those entitlements would have to be tax free. It is very important that we examine the issue.

As for how we take people down the road in the context of convergence and sustainability, there are three pillars, the first of which relates to economics. For a farm to be viable, it has to be economical and there has to be a return for what the farmer is doing. The second pillar is societal, which is very important. In this review, we want to be very careful in regard to that issue in order that we will be able to sustain and maintain farmers in rural Ireland. If we have learned any lesson from what has happened in our society in the past year, that is critical. Third, on the environmental pillar, we are up to doing what we have to do as farmers to deal with the environmental measures coming down the tracks.

Senator Boyhan also made some excellent points. The new CAP is being aligned to the green new deal, the farm to fork strategy and the biodiversity plan. It is worth remembering that those measures are aspirational and there is no legislation on them as yet, but I could not agree more that the pressure coming onto us for more green farming will cost a great deal. The Senator mentioned eco-schemes, an issue on which I am very clear. This is another cut. We are speaking about convergence but the European Commission and the Government are talking about anything from 20% to 30% of the Pillar 1 payment.

The history of the payments is that they were introduced in Article 39 of the Treaty of Rome of 1957. The money was put in place to protect farm incomes and provide food security. That is important. We have been producing cheap food for the consumers of Europe since then and the money has been used for that. There is now a huge shift and the money is being moved away from protecting farmers who are producing food to protecting the environment. We will deal with that matter but we have been telling the Government consistently that we need an economic impact assessment on the cost this change will have for farming. That message needs to go out from here today. Before we sign up to any agreement at the end of the year, I want to see such an assessment. I have asked the Minister on several occasions to do that. It needs to happen immediately. The only assessment that we have sight of at the moment is from the United States Department of Agriculture, which has shown it will have a serious impact on farmer's incomes, anything up to 15% or 20%.

Deputy Michael Collins said that a farmer needs to be getting a minimum of €10,000. If we look at the situation at the moment and bring this back to reality, the average payment is less than €9,500. That is where we are at. Some livestock farmers are depending on payments because those payments are 160% of their income. That is the reality of where we are at. All of those things must be taken into account by the Government when it is signing up to this new CAP reform.