Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

However, if you marry that with some other facts that we saw in the Teagasc survey on farm incomes published in recent days, you can see that average farm incomes vary radically. Again, there are gross and shocking inequalities. The average dairy farmer has an income of €97,000. I am sure there are plenty of medium-sized dairy farmers who do not have that size of income, so we can be almost certain that this is again concentrated in a very small number of hands. Then there is the average beef farmers who is on €16,000. How could anybody live on €16,000? The average sheep farmer is a little bit better off on €20,000. However, those poorest of farmers who live on a fraction of the income of the wealthiest farmers make up the vast majority of those involved in farming. Some 84,000 of the 135,000 farms in this country are of the poor kind. Their owners are on absolutely miserable incomes. There is an extremely important alignment of a gross inequality in the distribution of wealth and incomes in rural Ireland.

To reinforce that point, I rang Gerry Loftus of the Rural Ireland Organisation to ask him what he would say is the central problem that needs to be addressed in rural Ireland. He more or less said that there will not be a rural Ireland in about ten or 20 years' time - or not much of it - because of the industrial model of agriculture that has been developed in this country which is destroying the small and medium farmer to the benefit of a very small number of very wealthy farmers and the agri-industrial sector where all the wealth and all the benefit of our agriculture is concentrated. He made the point that the opposition to the EU nature restoration law is completely ridiculous. He said it was a fake debate and that if we did not deal with the issue of biodiversity destruction and the destruction of water quality reinforced in the report, in the next while there will not be any agriculture left because we will not have the water to sustain it. This is due to having an agricultural model that is based on an industrial model, primarily for export, which benefits a small minority and damages our environment but does nothing for the small farmer.

Exactly the same thing could be said about forestry. The latter is leading to poverty for the small farmer and is putting small farmers out of business. I have another anecdotal instance of this. During the week of the recess, I was down in Brandon in County Kerry staying with a friend of mine whose father is a sheep farmer. He is one of those small farmers. Looking at the incomes they are talking about, I asked him what was going to happen to his farm in a few years' time. He said there was nobody to take his farm over. Who could take it over? He has kids but who would take it over at that level of income? By the way, he is very strongly in favour of increasing biodiversity and diversifying. He is supportive of the climate and biodiversity agenda but he said there was no real interaction with rural communities and with the small farmers in terms of how we do these things in a way that does not destroy small towns or the small farmer, but actually listens and engages with them about how incomes, life and community can be sustained in rural Ireland. That is a very important message.

5 o’clock

The other thing which Gerry Loftus was also just saying to me concerned the shocking lack of investment in transport in what he called the BMW area, meaning the Border, midlands and west. That is not news and I am sure it has been repeated here. He put the blame for that squarely at the feet of Fine Gael as apparently - I was not aware of this - it opted the north west out of the Trans-European Transport Network, TEN-T, scheme of European funding. It would have meant European funding for investment in transport infrastructure in the BMW region, but for some reason the Government opted that region out of that scheme.

I have a final point to make in my last 40 seconds. Everybody accepts that for climate and biodiversity reasons, afforestation must be significantly expanded. However, I have a very different model for it than the one we have at the moment, which is damaging to the environment, not good for communities and not helping the small farmers. A critical part of this is the need to change the mandate and the approach of Coillte, the State forestry company, with respect to how it interacts with communities, small farmers and so on. The Government needs to urgently address the question of radically reforming the mandate of Coillte, which is also operating on that industrial model which is not good for rural Ireland or small and medium-sized farmers.

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