Dr. Maura Farrell:

We have done quite a lot of work. A colleague of mine Shane Conway did his PhD with me in the university in Galway and we did a great deal of work on generational renewal. In many respects, the last key area of policy that looked at generational renewal asked farmers to retire from farming forever. We can never have a policy like that again. When it comes to policies on farmers retiring, we need to consider the social aspect of the retirement as well as handing over the land. Shane Conway's research really looked at that. It looked at the attachment of older farmers to the land.

When it comes to handing over the land, it is not like retiring from here or my retiring from the university. Retiring from farming is not in the psyche of farmers in an Irish context. They do not retire from farming, because they are always farmers. We need to consider that in the context of the policy agenda. That attachment in some ways is a much softer policy than the hard financial policies that we tend to throw out there. If we do not consider the attachment to farming, we will never see those farmers retiring. A few years ago, Shane Conway came up with the idea of the farmers' yards. It was a social initiative for farmers to come together outside of handing over the farm. An initiative like that can sometimes be the trigger for a farmer to decide to retire while still being part of that farming environment. Those are quite small policies that do not require a large amount of money to keep rural areas going. We ran a pilot study on that for six weeks at Mountbellew Mart. It was very successful. To get funding for a social initiative like that can be a bit difficult, but it can be the trigger we need for older farmers to retire. When we consider that we have more 90-year-old farmers in this country than farmers aged under 25, we really have to question that generational renewal.