Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I know it is Deputy Flanagan’s intention to be at Lake Garda himself. Good luck to him with the electorate. They may well decide to send him there for more reasons than one. The Deputy is perfectly entitled to raise his case. The environmental scheme I mentioned, introduced by the Minister, puts €1.45 billion into the pockets of small farmers mostly and smaller entities, because they have had difficulty measuring up here. There is also a special allocation for those small farmers from places the Deputy has forgotten about or maybe never visited, €1.37 million for the farmers on the islands off our coast, and a further €250 million for the rural development scheme under the Leader programme, which also goes mostly to rural areas. On top of that there is a €395 million capital investment for farm buildings under Food Harvest 2020.

The Deputy raises a valid point about main street development in every town in the country. People these days have a clear choice. The retail sector has been hit hard and it is important that not only do shops offer a range of goods, competitive prices and good service, which they do, but they must also move online to give people choice. The young generation may well visit a premises and buy on their mobile phones or from the Internet in many ways. I do not accept the Deputy’s view that the Government has not been concerned about, or has not delivered for, the agrisector in general, big and small. During the process of the negotiations at the European Presidency meetings, we deliberately restructured the payments so that the small farmer at the lower end of the scale gets the benefit and that is taken off the big farmers at the top of the scale.

Deputy Flanagan does not want to recognise that producing a high quality product is essential for this economy and is responsible in the main for hundreds of thousands of jobs. That is why the Kerry Group is investing €100 million in Naas and Glanbia is investing very heavily on the Kilkenny-Carlow border. That is why there is movement in respect of land acquisition and retention, passing farms on to younger farmers, and why agricultural colleges are booked out by young farmers who want to get onto their courses. They see a very bright future in the agrisector, even if the Deputy does not.

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