Mr. John Keane:

In relation to the Fodder Support Scheme we welcome that news. It is something which we had been working on over the past couple of weeks. In relation to the "forgotten farmers" that the Deputy mentioned, at our recent national conference the Minister was in attendance and verbally outlined six criteria that the Department was planning to apply to the "forgotten farmer" category. We have asked for those to be sent to us in written form. We are still awaiting that but I can state to the committee the six measures that the Minister mentioned at our conference two weeks ago. These were as follows: in order to be successful, a farmer needed to be head of the holding before 2008, have a green cert or Level 6 completed by 2015, have never accessed the national reserve under the BPS or the SPS, have never been in receipt of installation aid, completed the BPS application in 2015 and be no more than 40 years of age in 2015. It is now 11 days since our national conference and I and our policy officers have received about 60 or 70 phone calls in that period. When I have outlined the six criteria to them, I have yet to have one "forgotten farmer" say that they are going to be able to access the scheme. We have criteria for a scheme where I have yet to see one farmer who is going to be able to access the scheme. We recognise that in the programme for Government there is a commitment for addressing the "forgotten farmer" issues under CAP. We were working very hard with the Minister and the Department this time last year to try and get that included. We were informed that there was not scope for that within the Common Agricultural Policy and it would be looked after nationally. Our interpretation and the feedback that we have got so far is that it will take a very small pool of money to satisfy the demand from the "forgotten farmers". As I said already, we have yet to have somebody contact us to say that it is going to be accessible to them. There is a huge amount of work still to be done from our side.

As for the Deputy's question on land scarcity, there is high demand for land in certain areas at the moment. That is a fair comment to make but we are looking at all policy instruments in the round and their impact on land availability into the future, given that land access is now one of the biggest challenges for young farmers getting into the sector. If you look at the recommendations put forward by the likes of the Food Vision group, the recommendations under CAP, four of the options under the eco-schemes, the options under organics or the EU nature restoration Bill and the issues around both forestry and energy production policies, all of these are going to do one thing in terms of land availability, which is to reduce it. We argue that is going to affect land availability in every parish in the country, not just in areas where there is already pressure on the leasing and prices of land at the moment. There is pressure in some areas at the moment and land rental prices are reflecting that but in the long term, the general thrust of these measures being proposed across all policy instruments will be to create a greater demand for land access. That is because either stocking rates will be less or there will be more land in organics and less land in productive areas. That is going to affect everybody. Top that with between 350,000 ha and 360,000 ha being spoken of in terms of rewetting, and it is only going to do one thing for land availability.