Paul Bradford (Fine Gael)

The Cabinet is dominated by Fianna Fáil and this is a Fianna Fáil budget. There is a new mantra in the lexicon of politics over recent months: "international factors". Every problem is now blamed on international factors. It trips easily and merrily from the tongues of Cabinet members who took all of the credit for the Celtic tiger. Everything good stemmed from Fianna Fáil, and everything bad is a result of international factors. I ask my Fianna Fáil colleagues to drop that mantra because no one believes it any longer. They were in charge, they took all the budgetary decisions over the past ten years to prop up a false property market, they built an economy on false foundations, increased borrowing, massively increased the public sector to a level that is now out of control, and left this country in the financial mess in which it finds itself. I recognise from the Minister of State's comments that he is acutely aware of the grave financial crisis we are in, but the blame, sadly but firmly, lies with decisions taken over the past seven or eight years.

On the motion before the House, the Minister of State's colleagues on the Government side went down all manner of culs-de-sac. I refer to the three issues before the House for immediate consideration: the installation aid scheme, the retirement scheme and the disadvantaged areas scheme. The Minister of State knows as well as I do that if agriculture is to thrive and survive, we need to get young people into farming from a management perspective. That is why we have invested so much in training and development over the past 20 or 30 years. With one stroke of a budgetary pen last month all the good work was undone and there is now doubt rather than certainty and fear instead of hope.

I did not refer to the partnership process earlier. For many months farming organisations, along with the social partners, tried, through the different pillars of the partnership process, to chart the way forward out of the current economic difficulties. It is grossly unfair that at the end of the partnership process, to which the farming organisations to the best of my knowledge fully signed up, the budgetary measures made a mockery of the word "partnership". They represented nothing that partnership should be about.

I appreciate that budgetary matters are confidential and are announced on the day of the budget but these types of measure pull the rug from under a future generation of farmers and breach the understanding of the word "partnership". If there is one small degree of consolation to be taken from the Minister of State's contribution, it is that he said the suspension of the installation aid and early retirement schemes is temporary. We can look at all manner of definitions of temporary, but the crux of the matter and the reason it is so urgent, as the Minister of State and I know, is that under the rules of the scheme, people who were eligible to be successful applicants a few months ago may not be if the scheme is reintroduced in six, 12 or 18 months' time. I appreciate it is not the Minister of State who will make the decision, but I urge him to ensure that if the provision is to be only temporary and the scheme is to be reintroduced, it will be done in a retrospective fashion in order that people eligible for the scheme today will be still eligible in 12 months' time.

Fine Gael's aspiration is for the schemes to be reintroduced immediately. I am, however, a realist who knows the Government has the majority to push through whatever it wishes. If the schemes are to be brought back, they must be brought back with a retrospective provision in order that people who have invested thousands of euro will not see their money go down the tubes.

I thank my colleagues for supporting this motion, which reflects the strong support of the Fine Gael Party for Irish agriculture. We realise that society needs a rural Ireland and that our rural economy needs farming families. These types of measures are part of the range of supports, much of which come from Europe, that we need to maintain if Irish agriculture is to thrive and prosper in the years ahead.