Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

It shows the Tír na n-Óg properties of the hills of Connemara.

What I said in that interview stands the test of time. I had been living in rural Ireland and involved in development for only three years at the time. Connemara is not noted for the quality of its land, and in that short time I had reckoned that it was not possible for the land of the area to provide family lifestyle incomes to an increasing or even the existing population. I said that unless we provided alternative employment, agriculture alone would not sustain the existing number of family farms. How right I was and how right we were to create those jobs. There are very few full-time farmers in Dúiche Seoighe but there is a vibrant community there of people who farm part-time and do other work part-time also. They have a very good standard of living. In fact, having visited the Golden Vale recently I would say that, because they are part-time farmers, the farmers in Connemara often have a better standard of living than people living in some of the best landed parts of the country.

There is nothing we can do about this. If we want farmers and country people to enjoy the same standard of living and if we accept that we cannot control world prices or change the Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, at will, something must give. Let us realise that. We cannot give more land to the farmers because they are not creating it anymore. For a number of farmers, the only answer is that farming will be a part-time occupation in the future. That is not what people want to hear. It is not what I want to hear but I am not willing to say to farmers that I can create circumstances in which the existing number of farmers will be employed at the same standard of living as the rest of the community given existing world prices and the CAP. It cannot be done.

I recognise the huge pressures in that situation. In dry stock areas, like my own, it is relatively easy to combine farming with off-farm work, but it is more difficult for small dairy farmers. It was for that reason that I proposed, before the previous general election, the establishment of a rural social scheme which would combine a practical approach to dealing with the income issue with the provision of top class services to the people within the communities by the communities themselves. The skills of the farmers and farm families of Ireland are huge. They are all little entrepreneurs. The know how to buy, sell, build, maintain and care.

This is not a training scheme; it is a work scheme. It involves a swap of work for income. The scheme is tailor-made to fit in with the farming pattern. It extends across rural Ireland into rural County Dublin. As long as members of a community are happy and are doing the required number of hours of work every week, they get paid. If that is tailor-made to suit seasons or milking patterns, that is fine so long as the hours of work are done. Members have seen the fantastic work done by participants in community employment training schemes in maintaining community facilities and sports fields. CE participants are willing to work at weekends because it suits them to tie CE work around their farm work. I want to institutionalise that. The caring services, for example, can be up-graded in a way that benefits local communities on the double.

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