Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for referencing the small farmers of my native county. He forgets one factor in his analysis of the agricultural sector, which is productivity. The original intention from many of the former eastern bloc countries was to have a flat rate payment across the board.

Were that to happen productivity in this country would drop drastically. One cannot equate a 300 acre farm in west Waterford which has an intensive level of dairy production with 300 acres in many parts of my native county in terms of their capacity to produce. The Deputy seems to forget that. He also seems to forget that the negotiations, which opened under very difficult circumstances for Ireland’s EU Presidency last year, were not expected to be successful in the first instance, yet the conclusion was a €12.5 billion investment from 2014 to 2020, as a result of which the incomes of the more productive farmers at the higher level were reduced and that was given to the bottom 50,000 plus farmers to raise their incomes. A further €100 million was added specifically for the Border, midlands and western, BMW, region.

The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Coveney, has also introduced a replacement for the environmental scheme, which is not as extensive or as flush as one might like it to be but which is a big help to the small farmers the Deputy mentioned. I do not accept his assertion that we should change the nature of the reform that has taken place. It is a question of giving an opportunity to the small farmers at the lower end of the scale to increase their incomes and to have an incentive to get into farming, which the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, has dealt with in the past two budgets through the tax regime. The Deputy needs to understand too that we cannot disincentivise productivity. He is aware that when EU quotas are abolished next year, this country will become the most productive agrisector country on the planet. Productivity is an essential and core ingredient of that development because the land will not produce itself unless it is worked and worked well and unless farming practices are of the highest standard, which I am happy to say applies almost universally now in Ireland.

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