James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Deputy Boland on her maiden contribution. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the state of affairs on the agrifood sector in Ireland as somebody who lives on a dairy farm in east Cork. I grew up on one and am the son of a dairy farmer and my mother has worked for nearly four decades in the dairy industry. Agriculture has been the cornerstone of my upbringing and my life and it remains a very important characteristic of the economy of the constituency of Cork East.

In my first contribution on agriculture in the Thirty-fourth Dáil, I wish to highlight an issue for the Minister that is similar to that faced by GPs and other sectors of the economy, namely, the age of the Irish farmer has advanced quite considerably. The research on it is interesting in that the average age of Irish farmers now stands at the age of 58 and approximately one third of active farmers, 33%, are over the age of 65. It is something we need to worry about and we need to worry about it for a few reasons.

In the Irish economy, approximately 7% of the workforce of our economy is directly employed in the agrifood sector. In terms of the indigenous economic activity that Ireland generates, according to the most recent estimates from the Minister's Department its contribution is worth approximately €19 billion. When we really depended on the agrifood sector was in the darkest hours of the economic crash between 2008 right through to 2014. When things were not looking too bright, we depended on the success of the agrifood sector.

We have been through turbulent years. There have been impacts from the war in Ukraine, namely, the huge impact arising from the rapid increases in the cost of fertiliser because of sanctions and other things that had happened. We realised we had dependencies that had not really been discussed in relation to Belarus and fertiliser production. There were simple things like compressors, which are used in every single milking parlour, that were all manufactured in Belarus as well. There also was rapid fluctuation in milk prices.

This was all in the context of the previous Government plan, introduced when the former Minister, Simon Coveney, was Minister for agriculture. This was around the 2020 programme, which called for the Department of agriculture to double the economic output of the sector.

Many farmers borrowed heavily to invest in expansion, purchasing, long-term leases of agricultural land, new milking parlours, new bulk tanks and all of the other supporting infrastructure that is required to expand dairy facilities. Many of them borrowed very significant parcels of money. This is something we need to be aware of. I want to highlight it with the Minister in the Dáil. Coming back to my figure of that average age of 58, we need to be concerned about that. Younger people are looking on at agriculture becoming an increasingly expensive industry for that transition between generations. I do not want us to go down the road of what has happened in the UK in recent days where agriculture and food production has become so lacking in importance politically that they are putting the farming sector there in a very vulnerable position by changing inheritance tax laws. I want to make sure that we in Ireland are always cognisant of the fact that agrifood has an enormous impact in terms of what Ireland as a country, an economy and a society does for our international standards around the world. You can walk into any supermarket across North America, Germany, across all of Europe, Beijing, Japan and other regions of the world and you will see Kerrygold butter on their shelves. You will see Irish meat products on the shelves in countries that allow our exports. That is something we should be proud of and that we also need to protect. I have heard some discussion about animal welfare in the context of this discussion today. I do not really see the need to bring that up and to constantly be banging on about the negatives of agriculture. However, something we need to do more work on is telling farmers that we are proud of what they are doing and that we support them through proactive initiatives.

The last point I want to make is a concern with the upcoming Presidency. Denmark is due to take it quite soon. I refer to the live export of animals. We joined the European Union common market for access to that market. I will conclude on this final point. We need to remind it that having specific rules on Ireland as an island and penalising us for that is not welcome and we need to protect ourselves against that as well.

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