Niall Collins (Limerick, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is an issue of difference between the coalition parties. The farming community is entitled to certainty. It would be most unfair to introduce a change in the third level college grant scheme which would impact on farm families in that fashion. The suggestion is that where one has a productive asset, a capital asset, which is put to use to generate income, after one deducts one’s allowable business expenses it will give a taxable income to farm families on which they then will pay their tax and on which they have to live. To penalise them by virtue of the fact that they have assets from which they derive their income would be the same as taxing anyone else in a job by putting a capital value on the job. The Minister is aware of the arguments being made in that regard. The farming community deserves certainty. We all wish the Minister well in the future Common Agricultural Policy negotiations. We want to see it work out well for farm families because the CAP delivered a degree of relative stability at a time when the supply of food was much greater than the demand.

The downside was the creation of the wine lakes, butter mountains and beef mountains, but it got the farming industry through those years. Now demand has picked up again and this is leading to stability. However, farmers face many pressures in terms of uncertainty of weather and the prices they have to take. They are price takers and are not in control of the price-fixing mechanisms. From that point of view, we are on the side of the farming communities we represent, as is the Minister, on our behalf. We take this opportunity to tell the Minister we are here to help him in this regard.

There are two other items I wish to mention briefly. Unlike my two Labour Party colleagues, I did not come into the Chamber to speak about myself. I am not a farmer, nor was I a banker working in a banking institution over the years. We are behind the Minister in regard to REPS but we wish to hold him to account on both that scheme and the AEOS scheme. The Minister responded recently to a parliamentary question tabled by my colleague, Deputy Ó Cuív, on the reopening of the AEOS scheme. In his reply, he stated he expected payments under the reopened scheme to commence at the end of 2013 or in early 2014. That is a very long and unreasonable timeframe for people who are waiting for payment.

During the past two days a number of speakers mentioned the cost of diesel, which is hampering the farming community and other sectors in Irish industry and society. We must have a serious debate in this country about fuel prices and the Exchequer take thereby. The spike in prices is leading to an erosion of our competitiveness. We know that because the 90% of the farm produce we export leaves the country by road, taken by both international and national hauliers who are buying their fuel outside this country. That is a loss to the Exchequer. Stepping outside the agricultural sphere, many families living in rural Ireland, where there is a dispersed population, are decommissioning their cars or putting them out of service because they cannot afford to run them due to the price of petrol and diesel. The economies of scale are kicking in here. Will the Minister look seriously at this and try to strike a balance in reducing the costs? He would get it back through an increase in demand and uptake.

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