Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The Minister suggests that I should inform myself and, perhaps for the tenth time, says I should travel outside the M50. For the tenth time, I will tell him that I live outside the M50. People right across this country have a right to have input into how our farming is done and on the impact on our environment. I ask the Minister to inform me. When the cut to the derogation rate was announced last year, he said that 7,000 farmers out of 130,000 family farms avail of it. By his own admission, only 5% of farmers are affected while 95% are unaffected. Despite this, he is going hell for leather to defend the interests of that 5%. Will he tell me what is the average income of those 7,000 farmers? Please inform me so that we can deal with that. We know that two thirds of farms earned less than €20,000 in 2023. If you add the 50,000 farms that are too small to feature in the Teagasc national farm survey, you see that 78% of Irish farms earn less than €20,000. The vast majority of those do not benefit from the derogation. This is a derogation that benefits big farmers and big agribusiness, which I might get to in a supplementary.

See this speech in context