Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to get the opportunity to talk about this important topic. Farmers, especially suckler and beef farmers, are at a crossroads. Many are not making money. Indeed, they are losing money. We must remember that farmers are not getting payments from Europe as a gift or present. They are supposed to compensate them for not being paid properly and in order that food can be sold more cheaply to the consumers of Europe. We must remember that farmers are entitled to payments because they are not being paid properly for the food they produce. If farmers were being paid properly, they would not be looking for payments.

We must remember that farmers are not beggarmen, thieves or robbers of any kind or distinction but honest and hard-working people who deserve to be paid properly. Mention has been made that the CAP is to be cut by €200 million. Whoever makes up the next Government, whether it is Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party, Sinn Féin or whoever, it cannot accept a cut during the negotiations because that would sound the death knell for rural Ireland. It has been said that funding for Pillar 1 could drop by 10%. We cannot accept that. If Ireland has to pay more into the fund, surely we should insist that we get more out of it. Pillar 2, which includes rural development, the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, the targeted agricultural modernisation scheme, TAMS, the areas of natural constraint scheme, ANC, and the pearl mussel scheme, is meant to be cut by 25%. If that happens, it will greatly affect all of the payments coming into the poorer and more deprived areas in rural Ireland.

It has also been said that young farmers who do not give more than 50% of their time to the farm - part-time farmers - will not be entitled to payments. That is absolutely scandalous and ridiculous and it cannot be allowed to happen. Many young farmers cannot survive on the bit of land they have but they do want to keep the door open on their farms. They want to keep their roads in such a way that someone is going up and down and ensure there is life to be seen. It cannot all be about planting forestry and closing down rural Ireland. If we are worth our salt at all, we cannot stand for that. I ask whomever is in the next Government not to stand for that.

There is also talk that, outside of designated areas, regulations and State penalties will apply to carbon-rich soils if farmers do simple things like draining the land to improve it. We cannot allow that to happen. Farmers need to utilise the little bits of land they have and produce as much as they can if they are to survive.

When we discuss the levelling off of payment schemes, especially for sheep farmers, it must be remembered farmers in the west need to get more attention than the farmers on the eastern side of the country who have all the options. In places like Glencar, Mangerton in Kilgarvan or other mountainy-hilly land along the west coast, there is only the option of sheep, suckler or beef farming. Farmers cannot plough, sow grain or milk cows on such land. Those farmers have to be looked after and their payments cannot be cut. Maybe the bigger fellows on the eastern side can afford it. The Ceann Comhairle is looking at me. He is a part-time farmer as well.

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