Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

A number of questions have been tabled on young farmers, old-young farmers and so forth which I will answer as we reach them. We worked hard during the negotiations on the Common Agricultural Policy to ensure young farmers would be given preferential treatment. As a result, they will receive a top-up on the single farm payment and priority in the national reserve which will increase their single farm payment. In addition, under Pillar 2 grant aid programmes, young farmers will receive 60% grant aid under the targeted agricultural modernisation scheme, TAMS, while everybody else will receive grant aid of 40%.

We will hopefully announce in approximately one month the first of the TAM schemes and we will roll them out thereafter.

All farmers, regardless of their age or whether they are legally identified as young farmers under the CAP regulations, will get grant aid if they are successful under the TAM scheme process. However, one of the things we had to agree to have mandatory preferential treatment for young farmers in the CAP was a strict definition of who would be in and who would not. Young farmers have to have entered farming within the past five years and have to be under the age of 40. Those are the two criteria. Some people will miss out because they took up farming prior to 2010 but even though they are under the age of 40, they are not categorised as young farmers and, therefore, they will get 40% rather than 60% grant aid. We recognise there is a group that missed out on installation aid when it was abolished in 2008. Some farmers who took up farming between 2008 and 2010 missed out on installation aid and are not categorised as young farmers. They are getting preferential treatment in the national reserve, which I will deal with in a later question.

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