Dáil debates

Tuesday, 2 December 2008

7:00 pm

Photo of Seymour CrawfordSeymour Crawford (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)

I welcome my colleagues in the farm organisations in the Gallery. I thank Deputy Creed for giving us the opportunity to say a few words on the matter.

The Minister and I were elected to the Dáil 16 years ago last week. Let us consider what has happened in the meantime. Ordinary family pig farms are closed. Mushroom units across our constituency are closed. Poultry units are under pressure from imports and poultry production and processing are under constant pressure from scrutiny that no other sector has to endure. Those who send their product to this country do not even have to label it.

The one thing both the Minister and I fought for was to have the complete constituency of Cavan-Monaghan declared as severely disadvantaged. That took some of us a long time yet the Minister curtailed the benefit from disadvantaged area status that goes to those counties. He must be proud. Let us think of the message it is sending to Brussels that the Minister would use the first opportunity to disadvantage those disadvantaged farm families at a time when we are trying to get funding from them.

The Minister also cut installation aid and the farm retirement scheme, the two methods that allowed farmers to transfer farms to young farmers. I accept that in recent years those schemes may not have been as important and the numbers may have been low because there were opportunities outside farming, but that is no longer the case and more students than ever are in agricultural colleges because they thought they had a future in farming yet the Minister took that away from them.

I listened with interest to the Minister on local and national radio trying to defend the indefensible. One of the points he consistently made was that great grants were given for the farm waste management scheme. When that scheme was introduced I asked his predecessor whether she had provided sufficient funding and she made a joke of it and said that money was not a problem. Because of the money the Government has wasted in all kinds of areas we have gone from a €6 billion surplus two years ago to a deficit of almost €15 billion. In spite of this, the Minister is trying to blame the farmers who participated in the waste management scheme, as they were forced to do, for using up the money and he is asking disadvantaged farmers to foot the bill.

It is not the Government that is paying for the farm waste management scheme but farmers in disadvantaged areas. They are being asked to make up the shortfall in the budget because the Government has squandered the money. Shame on the Minister. I worked with him to have the disadvantaged areas scheme apply to Cavan-Monaghan, yet he is the very person who is removing that benefit from the farmers of that region.

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