Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I too am glad to have the opportunity to speak on this report. I thank the Chairman, all the members who compiled the report and the secretariat, as Deputy McConalogue and others have. Agriculture is the most important industry in this country. I know the Minister himself is a cereal grower so he has an understanding of these issues.

I note from reading the report's many recommendations that the following proposals have been outlined. I will make a brief comment on some of the recommendations on the tillage sector. Recommendation uimhir a haon states:

The Committee recommends that the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine analyse the potential for agricultural insurance schemes as operated in other countries. The Committee also recommends that the result of this analysis be forwarded to the Committee along with the Department’s views on it in the context of a new Common Agricultural Policy.

The committee also recommends that consideration be given to policies which encourage the use of as much suitable land as possible for tillage. I am worried about this. I have no corn myself, as I have only a small bit of hill land, but I was brought up on a very mixed farm and I worked as an agricultural contractor. I did everything one could think of with corn. I remember bagging corn as a buachaill óg on the bagger combine and it was hard work. I remember the 20 stone bags which I could not lift. Deputy Durkan and others will remember them also. Men with the same physique as me could lift them and throw them up onto a trailer. I could not believe it. They could carry them up the stairs to a crusher in a mill. Those days are gone. I remember in 1977 drawing corn and barley and people were getting £100 a tonne with 19% or 20% moisture. It was nice dry corn, which was well ripened. As a farmer said to me recently, at that time we could buy a tank of diesel for a tonne of corn, and he was speaking about a 300 gallon tank. Now we would not fill a tractor for the price of the corn.

We had the set-aside programme for a long time, which I thought was a blight on the landscape with so many people starving. There were costs associated with it and there were the costs of conacre. It has settled a bit, but the prices being paid never cease to amaze me because of the inclement weather and the poor climate. This is a very late spring. Winter corn is starting to recover but we got some corn in on only a couple of days this week. We grow potatoes as well and none of them is in yet. My point is the costs are huge and the cost of the commodity is not keeping anywhere near pace. I do not know how people survive. There is the cost of a combine harvester and the cost of the tractor and plough, the tiller, the one pass system and sprays. Back in 1976 after setting the corn we would not see it again apart from looking over the ditch to see whether it was ripe or getting a bit into our fists to rub the grain to see whether it was ripe. Now it is sprayed so many times and washed and there is nitrogen and God knows what. The costs are savage and we are not keeping pace with them. It is in crisis because people are flocking away from it because the costs are too high and the return is not there.

The banks are not good at supporting farmers anyway, but they are reluctant to give people a loan to till, set and sow. They always used to wait until September or early October for the cheques but this is not happening. Farmers are not getting those loans. The country needs to recognise that agriculture is a vital industry.

We had a lot of beet but we had the demise of the beet industry. It was done by my party at the time and it was the biggest scandal in agriculture. It was the then Minister, Mary Coughlan. It was a crying shame that the industry was closed down. South Tipperary was a hub of beet growers. The whole season started when people would meet, often in a public house or some venue, when an agent would come along and people got their acreage. Then they started ploughing, tilling and sowing. At that time we had to till it and I often tilled it and hoed it. As a young fellow I pretended to do this as I ran up and down the drills. Then we came to the harvesting, loading it into trailers and bringing it to the railway station in Cahir and then to Thurles. There was a whole pulp industry and lime industry. There were seasonal jobs in Thurles. It was huge. There was also the whole area of the tops. It was full year round employment. As well as work for farmers, nine or ten young fellows would be thinning beet. Of course, they cannot do it now because NERA and other agencies would be out saying we cannot have young fellows under 16 thinning beet. We have lost that whole understanding of how food is produced and where food is derived from. It is not their fault, but some children now think money comes out of a hole in the wall, that milk comes from a factory and that sugar comes from wherever. That is the way it is gone. It was wonderful training.

The Minister is laughing - tá sé ag gáire - but I remember an old man, Jimmy McGrath, who used to thin the beet with us. He was a big heavy man at the time. We passed him out on the drills because we were young and light, and he used to be savage because he prided himself that no one could beat him at anything. We were up and down the drills and the older men were hoeing. There was all the work in that, and there were also the hauliers and people selling the lime. God be good to Liam Devaney, who was a great Tipperary hurler. He had more dinners in our house than anyone else and he was welcome. He always arrived at that time of the day. It was a whole way of life. Now the farming has gone and we see it today in the fodder crisis.

I am frightened for young dairy men. I salute their courage but I do not think the banks are saluting them. They have made investments in cows and big herds. The small farmers are gone. Every farmer at that time had a couple of acres of beet and a mixed farm. We had everything from pigs to cows to sheep to beet, potatoes, mangles, turnips, wheat, a bit of oats and everything else including barley. It has changed now. There is talk of diversification but we are becoming industrial farmers now and we have a huge loss of employment and a loss of those valuable resources.

I know the committee looked at this, and the CAP is up for review and God knows what, but in my experience it is unviable now to grow and harvest corn. This late spring will not help. I do not want to be a prophet of doom because if corn gets in and gets the right conditions it will come and we will have a good harvest. Last year, we saw 1 million big round bales of straw fewer than we did the year before. That gives us an indication. It was not because the crop was so low and so small, it was because people are going away from growing cereals.

We have another problem in Tipperary and in the Golden Vale because a conglomerate, namely, Coolmore, is buying every bit of land. If someone had an A4-sized piece of land it would almost buy it. It is pricing everyone else out of the market. The people there always told us they wanted land to breed excellent horses, and I salute their prowess and the many famous horses and the O'Brien family in south Tipperary, but they also have 3000, 4,000 or 5,000 acres of corn. They cannot say that is to feed the horses because very little of it is oats and horses do not eat wheat, as far as I know, especially thoroughbreds. We need to look at this.

We need the land commission back or something like it. Rural villages and towns are lonesome places because we do not have people on the land. We had the Bill from the Minister, Deputy Ross, yesterday which will mean drivers will have to keep a metre away from bikes. Holy God, imagine going down a narrow road with a combine taking up the whole road and then keeping a metre away from a bike. We just have to get some bit of common sense back in here and allow people to live on the land and have the land productive. I know we will never go back to the day of what I am speaking about and is mór an trua é sin. We need to look where we are going. We need to have control over the acquisition of thousands of acres by a horsing conglomerate. This is also happening in Wicklow and other places. The small man who wants to keep going or the young farmer who has all his green certificates and wants to be able to expand a little to be viable gets no look in. This is reprehensible. We need a land commission or something like it. Although this report has taken a pretty exhaustive look, we also need to look at the more deeply rooted problems because agriculture is in crisis.

I have not even mentioned the fodder crisis but part of it was because there was no straw. There were 1 million fewer round bales of straw last September then the year before. That tells its own story. People are going away from it because it is not viable. I know they have tried maize and other crops. The big issue with sugar beet was the loss of a rotation crop. It was a fabulous rotation crop. Efforts have been made by Deputy Deering and others, and I support them, to try to encourage the industry back again but it will be an uphill struggle. It was a most valuable industry to lose and shame on the Government at the time that destroyed it. Look at what it did to the town of Thurles. It is a pity Deputy Cahill is not here. It is falling down around the place. I drew beet in there and cut across to Littleton with a tractor and trailer and drew briquettes home. The briquette factory closed only three weeks ago. What is going on in rural Ireland? We can talk all we like here and have reports and investigations, but it is like Cromwell and to hell or to Connacht. Where will they send us? Agriculture plays such a vital part, and any young fellow who got training, whether villagers or farmers' sons, were well trained in milking cows with a stool and bucket, tilling beet, loading mangles or beet, hunting sheep, dipping sheep-----

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