PJ Murphy (Fine Gael)

The Minister is very welcome here today and I thank him for coming to the Seanad this evening. Like my colleague Senator Brady, I believe this is a very positive motion with largely positive amendments. There are just a few points in the motion I would like to touch on.

No more than my colleague Senator Brady, the first thing I would like to touch on is the bovine tuberculosis action plan. In 2024, as the Minister will know, over 41,600 reactors were disclosed in Ireland, which was a 44% increase when compared with 2023. This was on top of a 24% increase between 2022 and 2023. If this trend continues, reactor numbers will increase unchecked into the future. More than 6,000 farm families were affected by these bovine tuberculosis outbreaks in 2024. This, as the Minister will know, is a huge cause of stress for the affected farming families. Not only is it a financial stress but there is also the anxiety associated with having a reactor in one's herd.

The loss of milk revenues to the dairy industry alone was estimated at 145 million litres in 2024. This would add up to an approximate loss of €70 million at the farm gate, and approximately €110 million of a loss in export revenue. A total of €100 million in excess from the national Exchequer was spent tackling bovine tuberculosis in 2024. An additional €8 million was spent by farmers themselves on their own herd testing measures.

We are talking about huge losses due to bovine tuberculosis and one of the key actions identified as a means of tackling that is a reduction in the impact of wildlife on the spread of bovine tuberculosis. The introduction of a national deer cull is a very positive step to that but we have a huge amount of work to do there. Keeping the deer population in check nationally is something that was neglected for many years and there is a massive body of work to be done to bring that back to where it should be. Regarding badger vaccination, I am living and farming in a badger vaccinating area and bovine tuberculosis numbers have never been so high. It appears that it is not working and is something we need to reconsider or re-examine.

Moving onto something else that my colleague touched on regarding tuberculosis is the compensation or valuation of the affected animals. I have in front of me a valuation slip from just this past August from a farmer in County Clare who had 14 continental cattle tuberculosis reactors. An independent valuer assigned by the Department of agriculture came out and valued those animals at between €3,100 and €4,200. A maximum value could be paid to that farmer of €3,000 per animal. For the 14 animals in question, that farmer was at a loss of €10,500 compared to what he would have received in the mart. That is a serious flaw in our valuation and compensation system and something I urge the Minister to look into as soon as possible.

The next thing I want to have a look at is rural development and, in particular, LEADER funding. To date, LEADER funding has come from Pillar 2 of the CAP. In the LEADER tranche from 2024 to 2027, the project budget nationally is €240 million. My own area in east Galway, between 2007 and 2013, received €13 million in project funding. Between 2014 and 2022, that was reduced to €7.6 million and from 2023 to 2027, it was further reduced to €4.1 million. LEADER is one of the few sources of funding for small community projects in many parts of rural Ireland and I sincerely hope that this funding will be protected in the new CAP.

Touching on the development of markets, as beef farmers, we all have a fear of what might potentially happen to the industry due to the Mercosur agreement but it is very positive to see the Department of agriculture combating this in advance to try to replace any lost sale of beef from our sector elsewhere. We provide a premium product here in Ireland and what we are looking at potentially importing through Mercosur is not that premium product. I am delighted to see the Department now has people based in Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Abu Dhabi, Geneva, London, Mexico, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Seoul and Washington DC, all trying to expand the markets for our premium products. I am delighted to see that we are working ahead of Mercosur on that to identify potential outlets for any loss of sales that might occur as a result of this agreement.

The next thing I want to touch on is generation renewal. Back in the 1990s, we introduced the farm retirement scheme, which was progressive at the time. It was a means of encouraging older farmers to step aside and make way for the next generation to come in. It was a flawed scheme in many ways, though, in that the older farmers in question were forbidden from staying involved in the day-to-day management and working on the farms they had run throughout their working lives.