Mr. Pat McCormack:

Earlier, I alluded to the issue that one of the greatest barriers to young people getting into farming is the availability of land. Perhaps the word "early" needs to be taken out of this. Perhaps this is where there was a significant issue in the past. People aged 55 were going into what was an early retirement scheme and perhaps it was not sustainable. We certainly need to look at the model to see whether we can have a retirement scheme that will be beneficial, in particular where there is a family transfer and there would not be the availability of money from a lease.

If the average age of farmers now is 57 or 58 years, when we roll on three years the average age of farmers will be over 60. The committee members are the people who are elected to do the business and govern the country. One of the main reasons young people are not going into the industry is that if they were to do so today, they would get the same price as their grandparents got 30 or 35 years ago. We have not seen a move forward in food inflation, and that has to go hand in hand with this round of CAP reform. The current position is not sustainable.

The conversation was about eco-schemes, greening and various measures. We have the farm-to-fork strategy and climate action. We have all these regulations to comply with as farmers and to suffer the consequences of them, whether it is challenging output or the costs associated with compliance, and all for the same price our forefathers in the generations that went ahead of us received. There needs to be a clear message from our public representatives that food inflation has to go hand-in-hand with CAP reform.