No apologies have been received. I will go through the privilege notice. Witnesses are protected by absolute privilege in respect of the presentation they make to the committee. This means they have an absolute defence against any defamation action for anything they say at the meeting. However, they are expected to not abuse this privilege, and it is my duty as Chair to ensure this privilege is not abused. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against either a person outside the Houses or an official either by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable. Parliamentary privilege is considered to apply to the utterances of members participating online in a committee meeting where their participation is from within the parliamentary precincts. Members may not participate online in a public meeting from outside the parliamentary precincts and any attempt to do so will result in members having their online access removed.

Everyone is very welcome this afternoon. The agenda for today's meeting is the Common Agricultural Policy post 2027 which is resumed. The committee will hear from several representative groups: from the Irish Beef and Lamb Association, we are joined by Mr. Eoin Donnelly, runaí; from the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers Association we are joined by Mr. Sean McNamara, president and Mr. Hugh Farrell, general secretary; from the Irish Natura and Hill Farmers Association we are joined by Mr. Colm O'Donnell, CAP committee chair, and Mr. Tommy Slevin, national council representative; from the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society, we are joined by its president, Mr. Edward Carr, and Mr. Darragh Walshe, legal and development executive; from the Beef Plan Movement we are joined by its chairman, Mr. Eamon Corley and Ms Nadaline Webster, its general manager; and from the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association we are joined by Mr. Denis Drennan, president, and Mr. John Enright, general secretary. They are all very welcome.

The opening statements have been circulated to the members, who have had an opportunity to read over them. There is quite a bit in the statements and they are very thorough. Our aim is to have the maximum impact on the CAP and to make sure our political contribution is up there in front of the President of the Commission and the Commissioners as early as possible and to influence their decision as early as possible in the process. Our aim is to get that contribution in before Christmas. The finance committee has been putting together its contribution and I understand the fisheries committee has already made its submission. We appreciate the witnesses participation on this. Our aim is to get their contribution and then make the submission before Christmas. There are a lot of speakers. Instead of going through the statements that already have been submitted I suggest we go straight into the questions and answers. I ask members to direct their questions to the various witnesses. We will take eight minutes per member. If there is time left over afterwards we can do a second round. The most important thing is for the witnesses to have their say and if there are particular aspects that they feel were not covered in the meeting I would ask they would make a submission before the end of the week to raise those particular points, and make sure they are in as quickly as possible, so that we can put it in front of the Commission as early as possible and to have the maximum influence on the process as it is going ahead.

We will take eight minutes per member starting with Deputies Cleere, Kenny, Fitzmaurice and Aird and we will go on from there.

I thank all the organisations for their comprehensive opening statements. I thank them individually and collectively for coming in this afternoon. As we all know the European Commission has published proposals for the multi-annual financial framework, MFF, and these include massive changes in structure. While Ireland will play a key role as an honest broker during our Presidency of the Council in the second half of next year, our priority has to be to ensure the final CAP legislation reflects Ireland’s concerns and provides certainty and stability for Irish farmers right across the sector. I make no apologies in saying we have to be selfish about this. The witnesses' input today really matters and is absolutely central to everything that happens from here. I am conscious of time.

I will start with Mr. Drennan and the ICMSA. What is the likely financial impact on ICMSA members should the current CAP proposals proceed?

At the moment there is a 22% cut on the budget. That is a budget that has been there a long number of years and has not been index-linked. Take our flagship environmental scheme. My parents were in REPS 1 going back 35 years and that was £5,000. Some 35 years on, our flagship environmental scheme at the moment, ACRES, has a maximum payment of €6,000. That is the same payment 35 years on. If you look at where the CAP budget has gone, it is a similar budget. We are now looking at a 22% cut and if we take out 3% for the national reserve and 6% for young farmers - and nobody can stand in the way of that, we need generational renewal to be a huge issue - then we are looking at a 31% cut to a budget that has never been index-linked. Who can accept a 31% cut to a huge part of a payment that is in recognition of the sustainable food that we produce to a European standard?

And that ultimately affects the viability of the family farm.

Absolutely, yes.

Do the other organisations have any comments on that?

I thank the committee for the opportunity and the questions. We have sheep and cattle where we are. In that end of things, the numbers are reducing every year and dropping back. We see nothing there to drive it on. As Mr. Drennan said, we are facing massive drops by ring-fencing it. The ring-fencing is a managed way but there is no generational renewal in it. We have to have a clause there for the elderly people for passing the work on and continuing there to be a support and maybe give the other person a chance to work off-farm and develop it.

That has to be brought in by way of a clause, so there is probably another lump of money that has to come out of the funding.

There are continuous strains. A big issue is that with the way costs have gone and everything else, we are not at all in line with elsewhere, even going back ten or 20 years, on inflation. We missed 20 years on the price of cattle; we see where the difference came. We have the same variation here in what we have in the CAP. There is a big loss in income there and it has driven a lot of people out of farming, along with regulation and so on. Unless the proper funding is put in, along with food sustainability on farms, we will not have generational renewal. As well as the economics and finance, we are going to have a problem getting people to farm.

I am conscious of time but Mr. Farrell has led me to my next question. What would the witnesses say should be included in the new CAP to support generational renewal for farmers? Are there one or two specific measures they would like in it? I am interested to hear from all the groups on this.

The main thing we want to see on generational renewal is incentives for young farmers. We are all the time talking about schemes for this and that. The only problem with schemes is that most of the money goes towards administration and the people we get to do the job for us. There is nothing there for the farmer. More of the money is going on administration and the people who are left to do it. The schemes are watered down such that the farmer gets nearly nothing out of them.

We would like to see some sort of farm retirement package for the older farmer. We cannot always be talking about the younger farmer when it comes to generational renewal. We also need to think about older farmers and have some sort of package to allow them to retire and have a few euro. The main thing we want to see out of generational renewal is a viable living for young farmers. That is the big issue. With the way the CAP cut is looking at the moment, there will not be a viable living for young farmers. We need that to happen in order that older farmers can retire and give over the farm to the younger farmer. Older farmers must be looked after as well. This thing of cutting off farmers at 66 years of age must be out.

We have a young farmer forum within our organisation made up of a couple of hundred farmers all under the age of 40. Not all of them are actively farming, with some having an interest in getting involved in the sector. Long before the generational renewal commission was formed, we had a full-day meeting with them to see what are the obstacles to getting young people into farming. Lack of certainty of income is the number one issue. When thinking of going into the sector, people might put together a ten-, 15- or 20-year business plan. Looking at the CAP budget, it will deliver a scheme that lasts perhaps five years. If we look at what is happening with the derogation, we have gone from a four-year derogation to a three-year derogation. There is just no certainty. One point that came from the forum is that everybody described their farm as a business that has to generate an income that will keep bread on the table and the mortgage paid. It is very hard for any young person to go to a bank and secure a mortgage when his or her income is up and down like a yo-yo every second year. The way milk prices are heading, as things stand, we will be below the cost of production this month.

That is why we have been fighting for the past 12 years for an income volatility tool whereby farmers could put money aside in a good year to keep them viable in a poor year. We have pushed very hard for that. We have met with officials from the Departments of Finance and agriculture. We will meet with anybody who will listen to us that this is what is needed and what young people want. Volatility of income came out as their number one issue. Every young person needs either to build or buy a house but they just cannot secure a mortgage with the volatility that is in the sector. That is what we are seeking. There is no point in looking at CAP and at schemes of a short duration. Young farmers need long-term security and a steady income to pay their bills and put food on the table.

I was not going to bring it up but Mr. Drennan mentioned the potential nitrates derogation, which we hope will be signed off next week, with additionality to be confirmed. What is his organisation's overall view of the derogation that potentially is coming?

We welcome an extension of three years but we are back to the same issue of how to plan. We have nutrient and slurry storage requirements that have to be met by 1 October 2028 but the derogation could be gone by 1 January 2029. It is very hard to invest in a business in those circumstances. These are all long-term investments that need to be done to do our part. We are really focusing on derogation when it comes to water quality. We are the most regulated, most inspected and most compliant farmers in the country, yet everybody wants to blame us for water quality.

That is a fair point but, to be fair again, Ireland is the only country getting a derogation, as we hope will be confirmed next Tuesday. It is important to acknowledge the role farmers have played in water quality.

Absolutely. It has been a complete, whole-of-sector approach by everybody.

Yes, it important to acknowledge that.

Regarding the CAP post 2027, there is talk of a start-up pack for young farmers and about establishing business plans, etc. Our concern is that the Commission is all the time talking about simplification but this looks like a very complex structure. The second point is that token one-off schemes might look good but we want young people to come into the sector for the long term. On Mr. Drennan's point about volatility, we understand the Commission cannot control the marketplace but there needs to be some measures there. We see what is happening with milk prices at present. Young people want an income comparable with other sectors in the economy on a consistent basis. The Commission needs to look at that. We fully understand that not all the volatility can be dealt with but if we want young people to stay in the sector for the long term, we will have to deal with that issue.

I thank the witnesses for their time.

I thank the witnesses for their submissions, all of which I read. The big issue that dominates all the contributions is the cut in the CAP. We are looking at a 22% reduction. How will that affect the production of food across Europe and Ireland? The context is that in 1980, CAP represented 73% of the budget at that time. Now it is down to less than 31% and we are looking at another cut in 2027. We are in a situation where food security is absolutely paramount. There is a focus in Europe on looking at defence and all of those issues, and, of course, people have to be kept safe, but we also have to be able to get food to eat.

This week, we saw the recall of Brazilian beef because of hormones and all those issues. We find that when we import food from outside the European Union, we cannot stand over the quality of that food or the security of its supply. We may not be able to get it if there are problems in the world. One of the core issues we will have to look at in this particular budget is that to protect the citizens of Europe, we must protect their first and most primary resource, which is the food they get on their table. That is why I am asking what impact the witnesses think this huge cut in the CAP budget will have when we consider it in the context of the large reduction there has been in the budget over the decades.

I am very happy to speak on that. I spoke recently to a Finnish MEP who wanted to remind people that an army marches on its stomach and that defence is not just about bullets and guns. We talk all the time about the reduction in the budget, and that is a key point, but we are not talking about the increase in the ask as a result. A lot of what CAP is offering focuses on diversification. Increasingly for farming, diversification means stopping food production. The answer to the Deputy's question then is that the reduction will have a big impact on food security. It is not possible for farming to do all the things that are asked and that are proposed to be funded. We are going to do massive amounts of carbon sequestration, we are going to build windmills and turbines and we are going to grow crops for biodigesters. Where is the food security upon which CAP is supposed to be founded?

The ask is increasing and the money is going down. The demands from the Irish representatives are that we decarbonise other sectors invisibly and unrewarded. When we look at the carbon farming strategy being worked on at the moment, the direction of travel is to say people will be allowed to pick up some bits and bobs of a few quid to keep their farm on the road from increasing levels of environmental, climate and biodiversity measures. That is not food production. At what point will that be a priority in any of these conversations?

I want to challenge the notion of the budget being reduced and speak more around the text that has been put forward by the European Commission. If the budget is, in fact, being reduced, how can it state what it has stated?

An extract we took for part our submission states, "income support and crisis support to ensure that support to EU farmers is maintained at the same level as the current CAP." How can the European Commission publish in its literature that it is maintaining the CAP level when it is talking about a 22% budget cut? How is it allowed, on the one hand, to state that we will perhaps have a 22% budget cut, which is what we are hearing now, yet its official documentation states that the CAP is being maintained? What do we do about that mixed messaging coming through? Both cannot be right.

Clearly.

What is the proposed number? Where is written down? How can we see it? Those are my questions. That is in our submission.

Fair enough.

The CAP and the budget relating to it began with the Treaty of Rome in 1958, when Europe was starving after the Second World War and we wanted food production. However, we have allowed the CAP, through various influences across the European Union, turn into a green payment rather than a food production payment. If we look at who is in receipt of payments now, it is not about who is producing food and farming the land but, at this stage, who owns the land that is getting the money. We are at the stage where there are so many small schemes and Mickey Mouse jobs. What we need are four or five decent schemes that put money in the farmer's pocket, not the landowner's pocket. The farmer is the person who is getting up in the morning, doing the work, producing the food and putting the food on the marketplace for the European Union.

We are very vulnerable in the sense that when the Suez Canal got blocked for a couple of weeks, the whole thing went down the tubes. We need to be in a position that is for the person who is actually producing the food; that was the purpose of the CAP from day one. We need to get back to that.

There is the quality of the food as well. Our dairy and meat products are renowned throughout the world. We cannot put them in jeopardy.

This is the problem with the likes of the Mercosur deal. As farmers, we have no objection to producing food to the standard that is required of us by the citizens of the EU, but we cannot have a scenario that we produce it to one standard, which is then undermined by a lower or non-verified standard coming in. When it comes to cars or even tyres for cars or bicycles, in the EU, they have to have a stamp on them that states they meet European requirements. The most precious thing we have every day is our food, and that does not seem to need the same standard.

We also have to recognise that the CAP was formed as a compensatory mechanism for affordable food that recognised we were asking farmers to produce below the cost of production. We are still producing below the cost of production.

The committee really needs to establish what exactly the cut to the budget is, when LEADER, the eco-scheme and school meals are being taken out of the equation and out of the CAP. They will have to be funded through the national and regional partnership plan, NRPP. Technically speaking, that percentage has to come off. The budget is there, and that percentage has to come off the budget. Has anybody any idea what proportion of the budget is going to those three areas at the moment? If they are removed, the 22% is not applicable - it is less than that. Could the committee establish that? We have had no opportunity to meet the Department to discuss this with it, but we would like clarity on what the actual cut is.

It is about how much the cut is, but what impact it will have is what I am trying to get to.

The Deputy's question relates to how the potential cut in the budget could affect farmers. There is a statistic from some time back that 20 farmers per week exit farming throughout the EU. The committee has a responsibility to take note that the way this regulation has been written is quite divisive and risks young farmers not taking up farming as an enterprise. It was said at a previous hearing, when some witnesses were here last week, that this is a part-time job for the love of the job. When you commit to farming, you are committing for life. The way the regulation is written, however, there are actually two possibilities for how a farmer is defined. This is totally unacceptable and would make up a young person's mind not to take up farming, if they are not going to be treated as a farmer. I could call myself a Jack of all trades. Two people were at last week's committee hearing. One is a physiotherapist and the other a secondary school teacher, but they are farmers. Those two young ladies were well able to eloquently articulate their position.

In Regulation No. 560, under Article 6, there are two options for how we define a farmer. One is a farmer whose principal activity is an agricultural activity and another is a farmer whose principal activity is not an agricultural activity but who is engaged in a small level of such activity. This is not the way to go forward in promoting young farmers. There was a question from Deputy Cleere on generational renewal. This point again springs out at me. I have a young fella and I do not know whether he wants to take the land. He would certainly want to be treated with equality and fairness and have an opportunity to do a bit of farming, along with possibly keeping down another enterprise because most farmers in rural Ireland are part-time farmers. Some of them are in the room as well, and some of them are on the members' side of the house. We need to be very conscious of that.

The witnesses are welcome. The first thing that needs to be outlined is that there was a song one time about armoured cars, tanks and guns. That is what Europe now looks to be. That is what it is more interested in putting money into now. Let us bear in mind one thing; this is the first throw of the dice. We do not know how it will go. Mr. Slevin asked a question on this. We do not know, for the simple reason this is going to be like horse trading. It will be like selling a beast over and back or whatever, until you finally agree on it. That is the first thing I want to say.

I will ask a few questions. Every one of the witnesses might answer this one. If a Minister is faced with a 20% cut overall - hopefully, he will not be and I am of the opinion we will need national funding - where do we go? Do we go at the top payments? What way do they envisage it? Will each farmer organisation explain what their views on that are?

In the Beef Plan Movement submission, it was stated this may reduce competitiveness. Ms Webster might explain that. On top of that, will she go through, in a small way, that where land is being used for solar or anaerobic digestion, the benefit of it is not coming to the agricultural sector? The agricultural sector will still be sticking out.

Going by what I read in the INHFA submission, it will be opposed to a couple of payments. Will Mr. O'Donnell explain that? He has a question about stock and density. Will he go into that?

For the ICOS representatives, what is the knock-on effect so far, with 240,000 or 250,000 cows gone and sheep numbers reducing? Where do they see this going, with the way it is heading at the moment?

Mr. McNamara talked about the demise of rural Ireland if this happens. I would like to know his thoughts on the proposal at the moment. My understanding was that an entitlement is a property right - both Mr. McNamara and Mr. Farrell can come in on this - but that property right will be extinguished for an entitlement. The property right, or the entitlement, is going to be extinguished and it will be per hectare. I would like to know their views on that.

On the dairy sector, is Mr. Drennan concerned, and it might not be in this but I need to know, that the habitats directive is now being used as the brush to beat the derogation farmer? Mr. Enright will probably know this better than anyone, but is there a danger that the environmentalists will now jump on the bandwagon? It will affect every farmer in Ireland if this starts and it has to be nipped in the bud before it starts.

My question for Mr. Donnelly is on sharing information. He gave the committee a document. Will he go through the different parts of that document? What is his view on where younger farmers will pick up the slack in land if there is less of a budget? I think I have everyone covered but I will have more questions.

Reducing competitiveness is really straightforward. From a business point of view maintaining competitiveness requires investment and resources. You cannot keep reducing the budget and expect farmers to be competitive in that way. We recently achieved a protected geographical indicator for pasture-fed Irish beef. It is going to be hard to do that with solar panels. The whole thing is being set up to reduce the quality of investment going into food production. I do not see how we could maintain competitiveness in that case. In terms of land use issues we are undergoing a land use review. The direction of travel on that seems to be that we are going to allocate best use cases to certain types of land. We do not know what the shape of that will be. It is looking like a lot of farmers are nervous about it, allocating certain types of farming and activity to certain types of land. The fact remains that there is huge competition for farming land within farming and outside farming. At no point is any of that being addressed. In terms of competition, I ask Mr. Corley to speak to how some of the climate things we are doing are reducing our competitiveness in the beef sector.

With competitiveness, farmer confidence is important. One thing we would like to see excluded from the next CAP is the notion of clawbacks. In the past, farmers would have entered the suckler scheme and fall foul in year five and they end up looking for €50,000 back off that farmer, which is basically trying to put them out of business.

If the budget is less and the Minister has to make a cut, where does he go? That is for everyone.

I will come to that. The other thing to do with competitiveness is that we recently decided to ban the use of prilled urea in Ireland and other countries have not. That is obviously going to affect competitiveness. We have a scheme in this country devised by ICBF that has a large bearing on a suckler herd. The biggest beneficiary of EU money was ICBF getting €23 million in 2023. The quality of our suckler herd has reduced. There is no independent evaluation of ICBF. We would like to see ICBF not having that role in future schemes and the money going to farmers who will be allowed to farm and keep the best stock.

We think the money should go to the farmers. This thing of having to have a Teagasc adviser and pay two or three other quangos out of the money a farmer gets and the money that goes to administration is all cutting down the money to the farmer. We would like to see figures on what percentage of money in Ireland-----

It is 25%.

-----goes to administration.

The questions directed our way related to the coupling. Under Article 11 of regulation 560 there is provision for couple income support. Our position in the INHFA is against the principle of coupling because supporting a coupled option would require a further linear cut to all farmers' top line or off the top before you start to distribute an area-based payment for example. However, it is provided for under Article 11 and if it was an option that Ireland in its CAP strategic plan were to support, our position would be that the suckler and sheep sectors, which are both vulnerable, should be the sectors to be looked at and prioritised. Our position is that we would not be in favour of a coupled payment. We are decoupled from production for some time. It will bring back retention periods and probably end up distorting trade and not giving back to the primary producer enough.

On stocking densities, I hope this is a typing error in the draft that came from Brussels. I brought it to the attention of the CAP consultation chair. It is in annex two of one of the regulations, where we see the stocking density increased back up from 0.1 livestock units per ha in the case of sheep up to 0.5, and the suckler cow going from 0.8 to a livestock unit.

I welcome the witnesses again today. There is one good thing about this. They are all farmers here and all representing farmers. We are all talking about it and rowing the one way. However, the biggest problem I see in anything coming from the EU is that the officials are always talking about the cut. They are trying this one out now. They are saying it is a 20% cut. That is the first thing that we have to look at, which is that we are still going to get 100% of the money. When they go back to negotiate, they have to say that. I have seen this in local authorities all my life; they are always talking about cuts. In this round again we have to try to eventually get the term "family farm". What is the family farm? This is always the one that there is the most debate about.

Second, I hate repeating myself, but facts are facts and statistics are statistics, whether we like them or not. In this country, 4.3% of farmers are young. The percentage throughout Europe is 12.4. We are being told they are going to increase the European percentage. Their target is 30%. That is what they are saying. Let us say it is even 25%; that is double. They are saying they will do the same for us and the CAP budget plan is going to be worked around so that they can do that. I do not know how they are going to do it, but they had better do something. That is all I am saying. All the indicators there at the moment are that the 4.3% rate is going to go one way, and that is down. If that happens it will be interesting to see what they are going to come forward with as regards the budget. Having said all that I think they want to make it easier, because reference was made to the rural environment protection scheme, REPS, and the €5,000 for the first run of the scheme that came in. It was probably the best scheme that ever came out. Apart from the scheme itself, there was not a farmer's wife or whatever in the country at the time who did not applaud that scheme because it cleaned up the whole place. There was scrap and everything included. Farmers got a few pounds for the scrap. It was a great scheme. We all planted some trees. We all planted some quicks. It was a simple thing, and you got €5,000 for it. It was the best scheme that ever came out. Ask any person who was in it. You could say at the end of it: "I did good work and I got paid for the work that I did." How many schemes nowadays, having rolled on from then, can we say that about? Most people would say they got little out of it because whatever money was in it was eaten up on trying to meet the guidelines and so on. I will finish that as I have five questions.

It is soul destroying when farmers get a grant, and then they are working down the second, third, fourth or fifth year of whatever scheme they are in and they are told they will face a 100% penalty. I looked into a couple of those cases and there is not a case in them that there should not have been some leeway so that it would not be 100%. You would think they did something awful drastic. I am not talking one bit about polluting the river or anything like that. I am going away from all that. They were a lot simpler things. That has to be addressed.

I will address this question to each organisation. What are the key reforms they believe are essential for CAP post 2027 to ensure the economic viability of beef, sheep and hill farmers?

I will start with the question about the reforms. It has been touched on here in different ways with the cut we were talking about. It is a cost forgone to remove them from all schemes. They were paid for doing a scheme. For example, with the suckler scheme, the farmer calved the cow and that was it. They got the payment, or they had a suckler cow. Today, farmers are tripping themselves on actions and different things. We need to reduce all of those actions. It has to be a straightforward payment. We have created a lot of employment due to this. It has been and is being administered in other ways. It is not coming to the farmers' pocket. We are being denied it.

On this reform, we need to look after the farmers. We have areas of natural constraint, ANCs, but they are not what we knew them as years ago. That is marginal land and different areas. Depending on the quality of the land and where they are farming, they need to be supported as farmers to keep a family member on their farms. We need look to a higher level of payments going back into them, if there is a cut in anything or whatever else may be regardless of the cut. We have a flat tier across the country, but we are not working off a flat table. We all have different qualities, types of land and types of production. We might have a six-week winter or a six-month winter. We have a lot of this to take in. As an organisation, we would like to see changes there.

The key reform I am looking for is incentives. Cut out these schemes altogether. Getting incentives in there would be my key reform. Suckler farming and sheep farmers have to be looked after. We see what suckler farming is doing. It has been reduced by 287,000 in recent years. Sheep farming has nearly gone extinct. People are getting out of it. The problem is that for the past 20 years, there has been no viable income coming out of it. To get young people into it, we need see a viable income where we are at.

I accept all of that. My question was on the structure of the CAP payment. We are talking about family farmers. How can the structure, now and going forward, make sure those people are protected irrespective of whether they are hill farming, dairy farming, beef farming or sheep farming? In this new budget coming forward, how do we protect those people?

If the budget is cut, one of the most important things from the IBLA's point of view is that the split is fair. For the pool of money that is left, the split of that money has to be fair. At the moment, the EU is suggesting that it be prioritised towards smaller farms. A lot of them are most likely family farms where there is a father, son, daughter, wife and husband working on the farm. We have that small-unit structure in Ireland predominantly. The most important reform we can do as a country is to address the imbalance of what people are paid for the work they do. Let us look at the Teagasc surveys on where the money goes or how much people get, relative to the farm income that comes from supports. Beef, cattle and sheep farmers are inevitably subsidising somebody else because they are not retaining all their farm payments. They have been doing this for years. They are subsidising contractors, vets, feed mills and factories. They have been propping the whole thing up. We get agitated about a possible 20% cut in CAP. How many farmers have not retained more than 80% of their single farm payment? That is a 20% cut. If they had done nothing, they would have kept 100%. As a country in the first instance, and then possibly extending to Europe, we must address the imbalance that means a farmer has no choice but take the price on offer. The point I made earlier-----

I would like to hear what the ICMSA has to say on this.

I slightly disagree with Mr. Donnelly's point about the subsidising contract. I think we have been subsidising the consumer for too long, to be quite honest. Let us look at what beef farmers are getting at the moment. It is probably the first time in 30 years that I got a margin from the marketplace. I will set out the biggest challenge from a beef farmer's perspective. CAP is a big issue, but the bigger issue is DG Trade, Mercosur, DG ENV, the habitats directive, the birds directive and DG SANTE not implementing the regulations. We need to protect the beef prices that farmers are getting today. That is where the challenge is, to be quite honest.

If I could finish my point, ultimately the consumer-----

One second. I will let Mr. Donnelly back in. Go ahead, Mr. Enright.

I think that is the issue here. We need to target the payments to the people who are producing the food. That is the reality of it. The people who are getting up in the morning and producing the food are the people who need to be supported.

Ultimately, someone has to pay. If the budget is cut, we will then have to look after the mechanics of making sure the pool is spread is fairly among farmers. People will generally agree, to be fair. I agree that it needs to go to people who produce food and take the financial risk to produce food. If the EU budget is cut, the shortfall will have to be made up by the consumer. For that to occur, farmers have to be protected. If the consumer pays more, it should not go to the retailer or the processor; it should go back to the primary producer.

We understand that. I understand what Mr. Donnelly is saying.

I might come in on where the CAP money needs to go. I will begin by commenting on this thing of a load of small schemes with bureaucracy. We are at a stage now where we have so many schemes that the Department cannot keep up. The IT department in the Department of agriculture cannot keep up. The advisers cannot keep up. The inspectors cannot keep up. The payments division cannot keep up. I do not know how the Department expects farmers-----

We are not keeping young farmers in the business. That is the most important thing.

-----to keep up with the number of schemes. We are talking about where the money goes out of the final product that the farmer produces. There is a request sitting on the Minister's desk from the Agri-Food Regulator to give it more power so that we have transparency through the whole food system. Everybody knows what it costs to produce a litre of milk. Everybody knows what the farmer gets for that litre of milk. It then goes into the abyss. Everybody knows how much it costs to produce a kilo of beef and what the farmer gets for it. Then it goes into the abyss.

We had an opportunity to discuss it with the Agri-Food Regulator recently.

Instead of blaming the producer - the primary producer is the farmer - for the cost of inputs or the household cost of the shopping basket, we need to see who is getting what throughout the food chain. The consumer is willing to pay more provided it is passed back to the farmers. Multinationals should not be coming in and cleaning money out of the system that should be going to the farmer.

To speak to the Deputy's question about how the structure of CAP needs to change, it needs to be honest about what it is. The core problem we have is that we are all looking at a dog barking and saying "that is not a dog because a dog does not bark like that". The whole structure is set up to say that we support food production, but actually we prioritise climate action, environment action and biodiversity action. We cannot do both. We heard the statistic a week or two ago that more 1 million farmers are gone in recent times across Europe. This is a huge problem. We talk about how CAP has been successfully supporting farmers, but 1 million farmers gone is not success. We keep looking at a track record and saying, "Isn't it great?". We are prioritising climate action and biodiversity and we saying that it is for food production, but it is not. How CAP needs to be restructured in order to make the future of farmers viable is for it to support food production instead of just hand waving.

I welcome each and every one of the witnesses. We all have the one goal. We must work together. I have to start where Ms Webster finished because I have it written down here. When the single farm payment was initiated first and farmers started getting paid, it was to compensate the farmer for not being paid properly for his produce. Am I correct?

Yes.

Over the years, they have changed it and they have eroded it. That is not happening any more. The truth of it, whether we like it or not, is that a pile of farmers are being paid for not producing food, or not producing the maximum that their farm could produce. That is honest gospel truth about it. Everything is connected. The young farmers, or the young would-be farmers, see what is going on. To qualify for payments now, you have to be a full-time farmer and not have another job. There are 168 hours in the week, and we are going down now to 35 hours for industrial workers or anyone else in offices or wherever.

I can tell you that even if a fella did work 40 hours off the farm, he is making up for it on the double, as if he took a different job altogether. You give three or four hours for milk, and whether it is calving in the middle of spring or winter, it is the same story when the harvest is on. They are working through the night, sleeping in it and all. None of us would have survived over the years if we were not doing something else. With the high points and the low points, in every five-year cycle, you might get one right good year out of farming. We could say we had it this year. We could say we had good weather and good prices, but already the price of milk has gone down. We do not know what we are facing next year.

We cannot give any assurance to young farmers who are thinking about going into it because I did not get it and none of us got it when we started out farming. There is no such thing. Moreover now with Europe, with Mercosur and these other things, and with so many other fellas trying to buck their own goat, we will get conned in the finish if we allow them to bring that in. I honestly do not believe we are working strongly enough in Europe to block the Mercosur deal and I am very worried about that. I praise whoever went out and found out about the Brazilian beef last week. That was some piece of work and there is some God there for that to have been found out at this time because it is a crucial time. They will have to recognise that fact because that is what is happening. It is like a wedge that would be driven into an oak block to split it. When they get the wedge in at all, they will drive it further than 90. It will be 190, no bother at all. Who is going to follow them up?

Does the Deputy want to give the witnesses a chance to answer some of those questions?

Does anyone want to respond?

Briefly, on the compensatory mechanism, this is really important. One of things that affects the structure of this is it redefines the CAP payments from a compensatory mechanism to an income support. That is really important, and probably more important than most farmers or politicians realise.

If there is compensation in recognition of a loss suffered to your detriment, that is an entitlement you have. You can sit at a table and negotiate that. You can provide evidence of the loss you suffer. An income support is not something you are entitled to and that is a really important change in terms of how Europe is viewing farmers. It has legal implications to say we have changed from a compensatory model to an income support model. We are not here to be social welfare farmers. That is not what people in this country want.

I am glad the witnesses raised this because when we give people the option of these schemes for environmental reasons and to help the climate or whatever, this is not farm production. You are cutting off farm production with all these schemes. What will eventually happen and what they are actually doing when they announce these small different schemes that suit different fellas is actually suiting them by stopping them doing farming. We were brought up to farm what we had and reclaim and make as much as we could out of every acre or quarter of an acre we had. That is not that way it is now and you cannot have it both ways. Like the witness said, it was initially supposed to help fellas who were not being paid for production, but now Europe, the Greens and all these fellas have managed to call these payments as payments for farmers as such; they are not. They are for a different thing altogether. They are not for food production. Do the witnesses agree with that?

CAP was created to guarantee food, support rural communities and keep farmers' income stable, but the Commission has lost its way. It is stripping our income supports, piling on the regulations and turning a blind eye as cheap, low standard imports replace EU-produced products. That is what is after happening and what is going to happen with Mercosur. It was there to prop up farmers but is no longer there now. That is the big thing. The way I look at it, with the CAP payments, the main thing is most of the funding of payments needs to go towards the primary producer. That would be my demand. Producing the lamb, producing the milk, producing the calf or whatever, that is the man that is doing the main work. I am not saying anything about part-time farmers, but many people feeding cattle, feeding store lambs or feeding bulls, are part-time farmers. Mainly, the people who are producing the product are the primary producers and are those who need the CAP money. They have seen too many bad times over the years, where it was €600 or €700 for a calf and that was a win. That would not leave change for any man. It would not even pay to feed the cows. What we want to see in the new CAP, the main thing, as I said, is for there to be incentives there to look after the primary producer and cut ICBF, cut Bord Bia, and cut all these boys out of the grants. They are all taking a lump of money out of our single farmers. CAP was not brought in to suit them; it was brought in to suit the farmer.

The other thing is the fact we do not have a level playing pitch. It is affecting the tillage men big time, and if Mercosur happens, it will affect beef, mutton and dairy. When we get properly paid for one year, like I often say we do in five, then some other genius will carry more of what we increased, like driving up the price of fertiliser, plastic or even batteries for our tractors. Some fella will think something like, "They are making so much, now is our chance." There does not seem to be any regulation like that. We got swamped with the cost of fertiliser and whatever they could think of. Now, the other thing they are at is they want us to use this - what do they call it?

Protected urea.

Protected urea, which will grow nothing - that is the truth about it - and name it climate change. If we were here in saecula saeculorum on this Earth, we would not change the weather - not one of us. In the Dáil or anywhere else, we will not change the weather and they can forget about it if that is what they are at.

Some ground has been covered with regard to these issues. The question remains that if we look at CAP and go back to where it originated and what it was for, it was to feed the people of Europe who provide food, to subsidise farming and to ensure production could be got up and that farmers would be assisted in all that. It has evolved over the years into a system with investment in automation and has evolved in farms being able to diversify. Much has been mentioned with regard to the environment, environmental schemes and all those things. It has gone into places where it was never envisaged it would go in the beginning. However, this is where we are and we also have to recognise that.

It brings me back to the point I asked in the very beginning, whether the cut would impact the amount of food we produce in Ireland and are able to export and whether it would impact the food security of Europe. As a follow-on from that, if we are saying it will do that and it is going to impact the number of young people going into farming, because fewer will go into farming if there is less opportunity for them, what do we do to arrest that? If there is an element of a cut, and I do not think we should be accepting that at this stage, but rather we need to be working to ensure, and the report will reflect this, there is not a cut to the budget and that the budget is maintained and retained for food security and food quality for people in the European Union, but if there is that cut and we are in that position, where is the additional finance going to come from? It clearly has to come from somewhere. If we are saying our agricultural sector is so vital to the Irish economy and we are going to allow it to be sacrificed, I do not think that is appropriate. Where do the witnesses among the various farm organisations feel the assistance could come from to fill gaps to ensure we have the money to make that provision?

I thank the Deputy. To fill that gap we have to look at the alternatives, because there is certain funding there and a lot of funding goes towards security, that is, protection of people. Food security is every bit as important, even though the Commissioner does not think that. We have to send a message back from here because at the end of the day, that is what is going to keep our nations going. It is going to keep families on the ground. There is a pool of money there. We have to look for a share of that outside the ring-fenced money to bring it back into that and to increase our funding. Food security is something we have to look at. Some said decoupling may not be an option but maybe it is for sucklers. Funding could be pulled out of that as well. That might help to bring it back up. To bring the 20%, we cannot depend on our own Government here or anyone else, because it is based over a five-year period. We cannot guarantee getting that commitment or it is not being seen. We have to try to pull it back from Europe some way or another but we have to work on another funding stream that is there to try to pull some of it back. Otherwise, if we cannot bring that security back into the food chain and into the family farms or commercial farms as far as that goes, then viability is not there. As the Deputy said with regard to young farmers, generational renewal and even retirement, we will have people working until they are fit to go to the local graveyard and then we have nothing left. This is where nobody is there to take over. They are 20 or 30 years too late. We are facing that as it is.

The other issue, and it follows on from that, is generational renewal. It is probably mentioned in all the witnesses' submissions at some point or other. There is, of course, a focus on the older farmer and the older farmer retiring. That of course has to happen of course and there needs to be some assistance with that. However, one of the primary cases we need is to put funds in place to assist the younger farmer to take over and start to get in there. On that aspect of it, what level of funding will be required to make it viable for young people to go into farming?

There was talk of €25,000. Looking at the previous plan, which was 30 years ago, it was €15,000 in funds, which was valuable.

In transition aids.

For retirement for the farmer as well. That is not even being mentioned and that was over a ten-year period, up to pension age, depending what age the person took it at. This is where we need the funding there. Another 6% has been mentioned as a ring fence. We are looking at that being increased more. Equivalently, we need as much on the other side for the retirement, or a fair percentage of it, because many of them will not be able to take over unless they are in a large dairy or beef farm. The smaller farmers will not be doing that; they will have to depend on part-time farming. They will be dependent on the older people to maintain that and keep that farm running while they are away working, or where there is a young family or whatever else. We cannot write them off as a waste because they have a purpose there. They could be minding an elderly person or looking after children. They could be doing so many other things. There is benefit there to the community through the farming activities that nobody else can give their time to. We have to credit them for that, for taking the pressure off somewhere else. Allowing that transfer has to be built into it.

To go back to Deputy Kenny’s point on food production, how it will impact will depend on how the cut is applied and who it is applied to. That is a critical point. The other issue here, obviously, is that the whole issue of indexation has been completely ignored. Over time, the relevance of CAP payments because of a lack of indexation is a major issue. The other point is, we go to meetings on a regular basis with Departments and new issues come up. Over the past 20 years, we have funded those issues through CAP. At a national level, we need to put a stop to that. We cannot keep funding new regulations through the CAP because the CAP has been choked. There is too much required of it. If the budget is cut, we really have to look at the requirements being placed on farmers. The requirements will have to become less because the cost of compliance is going up. We all know the cost of doing business in this country is going up. The cost of compliance is also going up so we are going to have to look at what we are requiring farmers to do in these schemes. I agree with the point Denis made earlier about how we have too many schemes delivering too little to farmers. We really need to reform that system.

I have a different view, perhaps than most. We are talking about schemes and coming back to REPS. We are talking about all the things that were done before. If we stay doing what we are doing, how can we expect a different result?

100%.

What logic is there that says, go back to schemes or go back to this, that and the other. Unless we fundamentally change how we go about our business, how can we expect change? We are talking about generational renewal. It is really important but it is only one small element when we look at the numbers of farmers that have stopped farming, not just in Ireland, but across Europe. It is the decline of the skill base for us to grow our own food. If we do not have people who have skills - I was to be joined here today by Mr. Kieran Delaney. He could not come because he has a cow calving and the cow went down. He is there with a vet. Who could he call? He could call no one, because there is no one to help him. The next man is down in Kilkenny, too far away to get to there for Mr. Delaney to get here. There is a real example of what occurred today, and why Mr. Delaney had to send his apologies not be able to join. We have to change. We can talk about schemes and all the things that we have done before but if we do not fundamentally change how we go about our business, how are we expecting an outcome to be different? For me, it is really simple. The consumer pays for food. They either do it directly at the till, in a shop, in a farmer's market or wherever they buy it, or they do it through taxation, because the tax they pay funds the CAP budget and permeates its way back to the primary producer at some point. The consumer is ultimately paying here.

If our CAP budget is cut, then we have to find a mechanism in which the primary producer gets the money from the consumer, and that gets protected from retailers and processors, who will take it off the primary producer. We have to come up with a mechanism for doing that. We do a lot of talking and we are jumping around all over the place here, given all the different things that come up when one tries to answer a question, instead of having a far narrower focus on a very specific issue and dealing with challenges one at a time. The big thing for me, and we can put under the generational renewal heading - we have it in point 7 - is farmers' income has to be protected from more dominant players. If a farmer is making money, young people will go into farming because it is a viable option for them. When they fill out the CAO form and look at where they are going to get a job and provide for themselves and potential future family down the road, they focus on having to go and earn money. They ask themselves how they are going to do it. For me, there is nothing better than farming as a career or as a lifestyle choice of what you want to work as, but farmers cannot pay their bills. That is what we have to address, and we have to do it a different way than we have before.

Mr. Carr wants to come in. He has not been in at all yet.

A lot of it has been covered but economic viability is going to dictate where our food is going to come from. The Deputy’s initial question was, if there is a cut in the CAP, will it affect the food being produced and exported. Of course it will. We have a generation of farmers who are not going to do what the last generation did. They are well educated and have loads of opportunities. However, there is also a massive generation out there which loves to farm and to produce food as well. They are doing a very good job, maybe on a part-time basis. They are the people we need to protect and who are entitled to get the subsidy. We are talking about schemes for young farmers or schemes for the farmers to retire. The money should go to the people Mr. Enright mentioned, who get out of bed in the morning and produce the food. It is as simple as that, whether they are part time, full time, or whatever age, that does not make any difference. They are the people we have to protect and the schemes have to be directed in that direction. We have a massive number of schemes at the moment, and most of them are not worth applying for. Most of the money goes on the administration of the scheme anyway. Nobody is better off because of it. We have to direct it. We have to get that money into the hands of people who are prepared to get out and produce the top-quality food. We proved we are the best country in the world to produce food both economically and in a viable and environmentally friendly way.

It is time that our legislators began to work with us and encourage those people who are willing to do it and look after those people, not the people who are not. We have an awful lot of sofa farmers who love to take advantage of the schemes but do not want to produce any food of any significance. That is where we have to direct our attention over the future. If the Government does that and rewards them, those people are what will keep rural Ireland going. Most of them, unfortunately, are going to be part-time farmers going forward, but if they are taken out of the system, rural Ireland dies. That is what we have to try to protect.

I have a number of questions, but Mr. Corley may go ahead.

On that topic, the number one solution would be that the Government actually puts the money in. If that does not happen, however, there is only one other place the money can come from and that is basically from the consumer. There are three main players in produce, certainly as regards cattle. We have the supermarkets, the factories and then the farmer. I know this notion has been mentioned before about transparency in the industry and regulating the supermarkets and regulating the factories and, by and large, the Government has stayed away from it. There is an ideal solution. What would be wrong with a farmer getting one third of the upside, the supermarket getting one third of the upside and factories getting one third of the upside? It is probably within the power of the Government to do something like that or promote schemes where that is the end result.

The other thing is the way farmers are not being allowed to farm at the moment, and the EU money is basically like sheep nuts drawing a herd of sheep out of a gap. They are being pointed in a certain direction with this money. I do not think people in any other industry would allow their industry to be directed and for them not to have a say in it. Farmers at the moment have very little decision-making as regards farming, and it is this EU money that is being used to do that. They should be allowed to farm because they are the best people to actually make farming productive and to see young people in and produce food that people can buy. Those are the two points. We have it within our scope to do something with the supermarkets and something with the factories as regards transparency. That is where the money is. There is money to help some of these farmers if it does not come directly from the Government. Then, we need to let farmers farm because they can make the decisions that are going to make the thing more economical.

Could I very briefly-----

Ms Webster might be very brief because I have a bunch of questions from Deputy Fitzmaurice and a number of people offering for further questions.

I would really like to support Mr. Donnelly's point but just to go one yard further, we do not look back at what we have done and ask if it worked. Green policies do not work. That is a fact. If we look back at the hen harriers, there were something like 4,500 farmers affected by that at estimated losses of €98 million between income and land value losses. There was ring-fenced money set aside for that. The recession hit in 2008. Those payments were stopped. There were two avenues of payments for those farmers as compensation for their losses. Those avenues of payment just went away. Nothing more was said about it. Now, we stand here, and we have the same environmentalists who are pointing the finger at those farmers jumping up and down about Coillte because hen harrier numbers are still declining. Now, however, it is Coillte's fault.

Deputy Kenny came back again to his original question in the first session. In his opinion, incentives being there for young farmers is a priority for him. I do not disagree with that point. In fact, I support it. However, we had other vehicles there in the past, such as installation aid, but we would not want to lose sight of a retirement option at the other end. There is a lot of talk about it in manifestos and programmes for Government. I was a beneficiary in my family with my mother and father. It was a godsend at the time but there was an incentive for both sides. We can currently see the slowdown in land mobility and young farmers getting transitioned and getting hold of a bit of land. Therefore, we do need to look at a farm retirement option and build it into this as well. It is in the programme for Government. Deputy Aird asked earlier what a family farm was. It is very hard to describe what a family farm is. Teagasc would say that there are three types in Ireland: a viable farm, a sustainable farm and a vulnerable farm. For the record, viable farms are farms that can support a labour unit. There are not too many of them. Do not get me wrong; I am not saying that some of those are not family farms. They possibly are, and maybe they have more than one labour unit, but a labour unit means they can pay a physical labour unit on their farm. On the other end of the scale, we have vulnerable farmers. Those are farmers who need an off-farm income to become sustainable. Those are figures from Teagasc. I say to Deputy Kenny that I would not want to lose sight on the transition, but we do need something there for the retirement farmer.

I have a number of questions from Deputy Fitzmaurice, which he put earlier. Before the witnesses get into those, I have one or two questions on it as well. We are producing top quality food and selling it globally. One of the big selling points we have on that top quality food is a clean green image of our food production. We were recently making the case on the nitrates directive and the derogation and the way that farmers are the guardians of the ground. There is a genuine interest in having a clean environment and improving water quality. I hear what the witnesses are saying on food production and that the focus would be more on the CAP being towards food production rather than environmental. Will the environmental actions get taken at farm level if the funding is switched over that way? Is it one versus the other or is there a way of bringing along that clean green environmental image and, at the same time, food production? Is it environmental versus food?

I certainly do not think it is. I think both things can come along together. The generation we have now have really proven how strong custodians of the environment they are. We have learned a lot from the nitrates derogation and the work that has been done, particularly in the last two years, by the whole co-operative movement and the whole dairy sector. All the organisations have come together over the last two years in an effort to improve our water quality and improve our environment. We have proven over the last two years what can be done and still we are producing top-quality food. Our exports are growing year on- ear, and our food is being embraced all over the world. We know that. We know what is down the way.

Will actions be taken at farm level without the various different supports and schemes?

It certainly will if the return from the food we produce is enough to sustain us spending money on our farms to improve and enhance the environment as well.

It will be hard to do it if the co-ops keep cutting the price of milk on the dairy farmers.

It is the marketplace that dictates the price of milk, unfortunately.

If I could answer Deputy Fitzmaurice's question from earlier-----

I just-----

It will go into my eight minutes.

Before Deputy Fitzmaurice's questions, if there is anyone else on-----

Could I answer the environment question? Environmental actions could be taken at farm level. As has been said, the revenue is there but that is not the question. The question is how they will be measured. Right now, we talk about improving biodiversity when we have no baseline figures for that. We do not really have that information. A lot of what is contained and proposed in the CAP is on airy-fairy, wishy-washy measurements that we will have some day. It is, therefore, very difficult for farmers to say, "I delivered X benefit, X improvement and X result". If we talk to the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, about water quality, it is easily able to say that farmers are responsible for X percentage of pressure on water quality, but it does not explain what that means. It also does not explain that if every farmer in the country undertook the following actions, what the improvement is we could expect to see in the water quality. The reason for that is that the biggest impact on agricultural contribution to water quality is how much rainfall we have on what kind of land. There are aspects within all of these things that farmers do not control. There are some that they do and there are some that they do not, and we are not really having very in-depth conversations about what that means, how farmers will improve, how that improvement will be measured, and then what that means in the marketplace for the end result of the work that they do.

That is highly problematic for farmers. Farmers have made huge improvements in the past 20 or 30 years. Certainly, when I was growing up, rivers of whatever were pouring into actual rivers. The amount of improvement that has been made is huge. We also do not talk about the fact that other industries and sectors are all wrapped and bundled up in what agriculture is doing. For example, all commercial use of fertiliser is labelled as agricultural, whether or not it is used on a farm. Therefore, when the run-off that comes from golf courses, racecourses, county council use and so on is found in a river, it is labelled as agricultural. How do we sort that out? We have no clarity on measurements. I do not know how we can deliver a targeted improvement to the committee.

There is no doubt but that farming and sustainability can go hand in hand. No farmer wants to damage the environment but farming has to be sustainable economically. The sustainability stool has three legs, namely, environmental, social and economic. If the farm is not economically sustainable, the farmer cannot stay in business.

One term has gone missing in recent years and that is "carbon leakage". We have a scenario that we can produce food here, probably more sustainably than anywhere else in the world. The issue with the Mercosur trade deal is perhaps not about the volume of beef that will come into the European Union; it is about the litmus test that will undermine the marketplace. People say it is only 99,000 tonnes and we already have 260,000 tonnes but members should look at what is happening in the milk market. There is a 0.5% increase in world milk production and milk prices have plummeted to an unsustainable level. They are the fine lines we live between. If we are stopped from producing milk, beef, lamb or grain here, it will be produced somewhere else because there is demand for it, but it will not be produced to the same standard and it will have a far bigger effect on the global climate. Climate change and pollution are not issues just for Ireland. Air pollution is a worldwide problem and we will not solve it by not doing something here when that action will then be carried out somewhere else with a far greater detrimental effect on the environment.

People might think this environmental stuff is voluntary, but it is not. It has been imposed on us since the 1980s. We were destocked in the 1980s on the hills. Our land was designated without any consultation whatsoever and it was forced upon us. No compensation whatsoever was paid for the designations. We now witness the efforts our Departments and public representatives made to protect the nitrates derogation - the amount of resources that was put into protecting that aspect of farming - and we were totally ignored. We have been living with designations for 25 years and have not received a cent of compensation for them. I cannot drive a post. The milking people are wondering about getting a €90,000 grant to store someone else's slurry. I cannot drive a post or dig a drain with a spade on my own land without permission from the National Parks and Wildlife Service. We were badly treated in the previous CAP.

I want to answer Deputy Fitzmaurice's question; he asked a few good questions. The entitlements should be abolished immediately. They were the most scandalous thing ever introduced in this country. Some 40% of the entitlements that were leased out were held by investors - they were not farmers at all - lying at home in their beds.

Are they not a property right? This is the question.

Forget about the property rights. We cannot go back.

I am asking the question about the witnesses' view because every one of us, as public representatives, deal with changeovers when someone passes away. Everyone who has to deal with it knows, if people have not said they bequeath everything they own, they can give the land and then it comes to entitlements and if they have not written into the will that they bequeath everything they own or the entitlements, they are not given. They go back to the national reserve. My question is for anyone who wants to respond. Are they a property right? Will there be trouble getting rid of a property right?

They are the same as milk quotas, if you like. Milk quotas-----

Will Mr. Enright give Mr. Slevin a second?

It is a question I would like to answer too. Whether or not it is a property right, entitlements have to be removed because a young fellow starting out who buys a bit of land - maybe for the first time in his life he able to do so - has to pay someone who is lying at home for the privilege to farm that land. The entitlement has to go to the man who is working the land, not the investor who is lying at home in bed.

Okay. Would Mr. Enright like to answer?

Milk quotas were a property right as well.

Will he go through the rest of my questions as well?

They were abolished in 2015. Entitlements are no different. If they are abolished, they are abolished. Mr. Drennan will cover the habitats directive.

Yes. Going back to where to cut, there is a proposal to cut anyone who earns more than €100,000 from entitlements. We fully support that but €20,000 is a very low base to start cutting people's entitlements. There are not many people working in this House for less than €20,000 or anywhere near that. How do they expect people to survive?

I agree totally that the habitats directive is being used. It is the thin end of a wedge and we are not looking at the consequences. The European Commission is afraid of their lives that they will be taken to court again like in the Dutch case. The Dutch case was taken by an NGO. However, we have a system in this country, which I hope will be abolished with what has been announced today, that anyone can take a court case and the Exchequer will pick up the bill if it is taken on environmental grounds. It is being completely abused and we have people costing the taxpayer millions of euro.

Society elects people to be public representatives to consider many factors before deciding whether something should go ahead.

My question is on the habitats directive. I am reading stuff that came through about the use of fertiliser having to come down.

Yes, in four catchments.

At the moment, derogation farmers have to do screening out of different areas over three years. If we let this in now, are we opening the door so that the person on 100 or 80 units will be brought into the same net? The people who love going to court will go to court and to the European Court of Justice, ECJ. I call it a kangaroo court because it goes with everything that is not normal. I saw what the habitats directive did to the designated areas. I am in one of these areas. Mr. Slevin is 100% right in what he said about them getting nothing. They were left behind. If we let this in now, are we opening the door so that, five or ten years down the road, we will be in serious bother?

It has already been signed into law. That is the point. Then Minister, Michael D. Higgins, signed it into law back in 1997. The NPWS has not enforced it for the past 25 years. It is now coming up because it was let in as the thin edge of the wedge under the derogation, but it is really there under the water framework directive, not the derogation.

Is it Europe that is pushing this?

Yes, Europe is pushing it.

We have the habitats and birds directives that came in in the early 1990s.

I know all about them. We were the first in the firing line, we bog men when they were flying helicopters over us. Everyone else thought it did not matter, but everyone around Ireland now knows how it matters.

The way those directives are being interpreted is not what was intended and Europe will have to look at them again.

It really is going to be the thin end of the wedge. If someone wants to build a house, will that be the end of the project eventually? Will someone end up having to do an appropriate assessment for the smallest-----

Hold on. It is not "will they?". In my area at the moment, because of designation, people have to do a screening out appropriate assessment in any place near us.

It is going to end up everywhere though.

Ports, airports and everything are now blocked. Will the rest of the witnesses answer my questions?

Deputy Fitzmaurice asked me a question about the diagram in our submission. It was taken straight from a Commission website. One of the points I made in our submission was about getting accurate information that can be read and studied and at least challenged, if people find stuff objectionable in it. This table shows that, of the €865 billion budget, the small portion represented by the little green box is the €290-odd billion for ring-fencing for CAP income support. The bigger number is the €453 billion for the national and regional partnership plans, NRPPs.

The question is, what is available out of that fund that can be directed towards primary producers or farmers, outside of the ring-fenced income support? I think there should be a portion of that, for sure. The next question that comes on from that €290-odd billion is the €8.1 billion that is on the table for Ireland. Again, I have sent the links of all this information on the EU websites. That is only something like 2%. There is an exercise about external convergence. I am going to ask through the Chair, what is Ireland doing about external convergence to increase our share of that pool? We have a target of €8.1 billion at the moment, based on the current split. The split can be challenged and are we challenging that split for the 2027 to 2034 number? That is called external convergence. We need to be sure to be following up on that. The table shows clearly what the budget proposal is for the full 2028 to 2034 profile and where everything sits together. That is why I included it because they for me are facts. That is why I asked the question at the outset of Deputy Kenny. We are talking about the 20% reduction but yet the EU information is saying it is being funded similarly to the current CAP. Which is the truth? Where do we find the truth? Where do we go? We do not go to ChatGPT or AI and do a search on Google. We have to have a repository in which documents can be referenced, reviewed and subsequently challenged as being the facts. We do not want to deal in hearsay in a pub that there is going to be a 30% reduction in the CAP payment and everyone goes marching. This is too big a deal not to have accurate information being shared. One of my challenges through this committee is to ask what are we doing within our own agriculture Department to make sure that the information is being shared in a timely manner?

The CAP budget, I think is now €293.7 million is what Mr. Donnelly is saying, but going by before, there are two parts to it, €291 million and €95 million. That is what I am looking at.

No, the Deputy is talking about the 20% cut and what do we cut or where do we cut it. We have to look at production but we also have to look at the smaller family farms to try to keep them viable, because so many of them dying out all over the country. We need to be looking at keeping a fair share of the payments in that area.

Going back to the fund for the security and policing in Europe, which Mr. Donnelly mentioned, there is a lot of money that can be capped up on. Maybe eco-scheme payments could be taken out of it and that the original payment go back into the CAP as we knew it, without eco-scheme payments, and let all eco-scheme payments come out of it. That is what we should be looking at.

I do not want to repeat myself but on food sustainability, that is another target that can be got in these funds. We have to be looking at this with our MEPs in Europe and trying to negotiate to get these things across the line. If we start looking at where we are going to cut our own people here in our own country, without getting back in here first and foremost, I think we are go down the wrong road. We have to be sure that the support is coming, not from our own budget, but from outside that budget, because we have more than lost and paid it over the years. That is what we have to fight hard to get.

We are here to talk about the CAP budget but we seem to be going away from it. I have three further questions and the witnesses can write to me afterwards to tell me their views on them. It seems that people have the image out there of white gold. When I started off, I started with very little and I bought milk quota all the way up along, because that is all I could do. I was buying my way into producing milk, to try to get a week's wages. I was out there along with many others buying something to get a week's wage out of it. It was a huge amount of money. I worked the back out of it and that was just taken away overnight and it is gone. We all had downers, and I accept 100% what Mr. Donnelly said earlier. That is why, in this CAP budget, if we can get things right, it will be great. We have talked about young people today, we talk about milk and the co-ops. There is only one person who can prop up the co-ops and that is the producer. It is the fella milking the cows this morning and this evening. He is the only person that you take the money off. The same applies to the cattle going into the factory. The producer props this up. I will give my opinion and then I will get to my questions. When things are good, everything goes up. We can see this with the price of diesel, insurance, oil and everything else. Everything goes up but when they drop, they do not drop proportionally with it either and we are left then carrying the can, and we are in a minus situation. People do not even believe that. My father before me did it and I have been a dairy farmer all of my life. To produce winter milk at the moment is not going to pay going forward because of the costs. How long can somebody sustain that? We do it and I compare myself with the shopkeepers years ago when I was a young fella, delivering milk in Portlaoise. Where are all the small shops gone? They are all closed. They loved meeting the people but they just could not keep the doors open. Then the younger generation came along and decided to close a lot of these businesses down. It was hard on families but they were not making money, so they closed them. Other people kept going because of their pride. Pride keeps us going but when it comes to the next generation they look at a non-profitable business and close the doors.

Leaving all of that aside, we have one hope and that is all of us going together. We are all farmers, at the end of the day and we are all producing stuff out of the ground as best we can and we have excelled ourselves in many areas. As was said, it does not matter if it is horses or not, we are just brilliant at what we do and we have very good veins of land in the country, some better than others, and we have to look after the person in order that we all get an income out of it.

Going back to the CAP, my questions are, what changes to environmental measures, eco-schemes, conditionality, stock limits and biodiversity actions are needed to deliver workable climate and nature outcomes without undermining farm incomes or livestock production? What role should co-operatives and producer organisations play in improving market power, pricing transparency and fairness to the supply chain, and what CAP instruments could strengthen this role for us? We spoke earlier about simplification measures and everybody is in line with me on it. Under CAP, going forward, what specific simplification measures, in inspections, paperwork, compliance, digital systems or scheme eligibility rules are most urgently needed to reduce the administrative burden for farmers in the next CAP budget? I would like to hear answers from the witnesses to these questions.

I was going to answer Deputy Fitzmaurice's question first, but I do not want to take away from Deputy Aird.

That is okay, we are all here together.

We will get them all answered.

On what effect the reduction in livestock numbers would have for ICOS co-ops, the main concern would be the decrease in farmers with it. The two of them contribute particularly to a decline in business and use for co-op agriculture trading stores and that is not just bad for the co-op, that is also bad for the farmers they serve. Many of them are in remote areas and many of those farm businesses depend on that store for their inputs and ultimately that could be an issue.

My colleagues have spoken well about the importance of generational renewal. The price of animals and the demand for animals is probably something of a barrier for entry for the next cohort of farmers coming in. The price for animals has been a due reward for people who stuck at it, so we are certainly not saying that it should decrease, but that is where we see it with the decline in livestock.

To Deputy Aird, the co-ops do inherently play that role in giving farmers a stronger place in the marketplace and a better bargaining position.

With regard to what CAP can do, it should maintain its fully funded budget and ring-fenced nature in respect of both Pillar 1 and Pillar 2, providing stability so that, like farmers, co-ops can make investments, develop products and markets, and negotiate on behalf of farmers. That stability is good for the farmer and the co-op alike. I do not know if Mr. Enright has anything to add but that is all I have.

On Deputy Aird's question on the changes that need to be made to environmental measures under the CAP, the dairy vision report, the beef vision report and the tillage vision report all looked at the climate issue. From where we stand, they seem to be gathering dust. We also have the just transition and we now have the nature restoration law. CAP cannot do the job on these because the money is simply not there, even within the existing budget. If these issues are to be addressed, funding will have to come from elsewhere.

On simplification, we have been hearing about simplification for years. Our concern is that there seems to be a very strong focus on simplifying for the regulators while the focus on simplifying for the farmers is not as strong. We need to get down to simplifying issues for farmers. Our perspective is that we need to reform the schemes we have. We need to look at what is in the schemes and what is relevant. We also need to properly reward farmers for participation in those schemes. We are not properly rewarding farmers. Those are the two points I would make in relation to that.

I will speak to the environment question. The Deputy asked what changes need to be made to the environment measures. They need to start being realistic. We need a definitive start point. We talk about climate being global but the environment is local. Very often, we only talk about the impact farming has on a particular area and not about all of the co-contributing factors. You cannot just target farmers in isolation and expect the environment to magically spring back. As the majority landowners, farmers do have a huge impact but there are things upstream and downstream and surrounding them that also have impacts. All of that is completely ignored. We need precise and targeted measures implemented at local level rather than broad overarching things. We have some broad overarching things that actually disimprove the environment. Calendar farming is one example. Depending on the weather in any given year, are farmers empowered and supported to get slurry or muck spread at the appropriate time for their land, their needs and their nutrient values? The answer is that they are not. We need to think about it in a more realistic way and to stop bringing in broad overarching things.

We are living through a nightmare with these environmental issues. We have carbon footprints, emissions, methane and different levies on schemes and other things. These are all coming at us and payments are being cut, which hits us directly. No farmer has ever been given out a print-out or statement of what is on their farm, where reductions and changes can be made or how things could be improved. That is something we have been seeking for years. At the same time, it has happened even with the price of heating oil. It has happened with many different things. This is what we need to address. Give us a statement and let us work from there as we go forward.

I acknowledge Deputy Aird's comments about the dairy sector and how farmers are on more marginal land and harder ground. At last week's hearing, he talked about the Golden Vale versus the top of Kerry. We are all farming to the best of our ability, particularly in the areas I represent. It is not fully about production. There is now talk about environmental dividends and resilience to climate change. It has been clear to see in recent times that lands along the western seaboard have the ability to adapt to climate change. They are very resilient. There is more moisture in the soil and they can cater for times of drought. It is not unusual to see cattle going in when the ground is burnt up in the middle of the summertime. This may be a reality of climate change but that resilience is there. As the Deputy said, we all have to work together, whether we are at the top of Kerry or in the Golden Vale. We need to help each other out. It is critical that all farmers are defined equally in the regulation. As I said earlier, it is divisive. There is an opportunity here to pit two different types of farmers, those whose principal activity is an agricultural activity and those whose principal activity is not, against each other. We do not want to go down that road. I say that to all members of the committee. We need to keep all the people who are farming farming, whether they are on the top of a hill, in the Golden Vale or anywhere in between.

Part-time farmers are farming but cannot make a living at home, is that not it?

I am sorry that I was not here earlier on. On Questions on Policy or Legislation in the Dáil today, I asked Deputy Micheál Martin about what went on recently with the Mercosur meat that came over and the hormones that were detected in it. The CAP is there for food security. I basically asked whether cars are more important than public health. I got absolute waffle in response. I said that to the Taoiseach across the room. I told him he did not answer my questions. There was absolutely no answer. That tells you where the priorities lie. I guarantee that they do not lie with public health. The Government has its buddies in Europe with their big deals and fancy cars. That is what it all boils down to. It does not matter whether we are talking about derogations, the CAP budget or the Mercosur agreement; that is where the priorities are. The farming community is small but we feed everybody. I also asked the Taoiseach whether he was worried about this and told him that I was worried about the food I am giving my children. That is where all of this should be targeted. It should not be kept in-house within the farming community because it matters to everybody. It is about the mother feeding her child and the people in our nursing homes. It is about all of these people. The witnesses have spoken about other issues. Nobody has mentioned the public health bill we will face in years to come. Who is going to foot that bill? Who is going to pay for it when our health has gone downhill? I have said here in the committee that we should have sent people out to Brazil and the other Mercosur countries to see what is going on. We cannot take the word-----

To be helpful, we are arranging for a meeting on the Mercosur agreement but this meeting is focused on the CAP.

I am getting to my point. The CAP was designed for food security and health. It is all connected. Deputy Aird was talking about schemes. I guarantee that, if farmers had more input into schemes, they would be a lot simpler. I do not remember ever getting a survey at home asking how a scheme we had signed up to had worked. We were never asked for our input, what we felt we gained from the scheme or what was bad about it. We do surveys on everything else. Where are the surveys for the farmers? I have not done one. I do most of the paperwork for the farm at home and I have not filled one out. Schemes need to be designed around the farmer. There should be nothing about you without you.

Schemes that are designed from the top down are bound to fail. We must design everything from the bottom up, because without a bottom, the deck of cards will fall over. What input has there been by farming organisations into the existing schemes? That is the first question. Food security must be the way to go. The budget cannot be cut because it would have a big impact on our food security and food health. Food health is where the fight has to be.

We have four boys at home on the farm. I would love to say to one of them that he can have it. My husband knew early in his career that he was going to farm. It is a great life, but it is a hard life. As Mr. Donnelly said, if a cow is going to calve, it is going to calve. The idea of having a part-time job does not work so well for a suckler man. It is fine for us to be at home as we have young kids. My husband is at home and he is able to look after them as well as the farm, but a cow does not wait for anybody when she is calving. It is difficult for that end of it at a certain time of the year.

How can farming organisations have more input when it comes to the schemes? How can we demand that this cut is not going to happen? How do we speak to the wider community, outside the farming organisations, to explain that food health is at risk? I do not want to eat beef from another country where they can do what they like. With all the hoops that we have had to jump through because of Europe, farmers are proud of the food they produce. It is top quality. We have the best ground to produce top quality food. I will leave it to the witnesses to respond.

In terms of schemes, from an IBLA point of view, we would like to be invited to some of the stakeholder meetings. We are not included in the CAP stakeholder group, so we are not going to be asked for our opinion on what we should be doing with the CAP. For some reason we are out in the cold. We had our fifth AGM in November, yet we do not seem to be wanted. Perhaps our questions are too direct or we are asking questions that others are not asking. Our view is that we need to be in the room in a consultative process.

In terms of food security, one of the most important things is the label that goes on food, not just the food we might buy in the retail sector but also in the food service area. Let us look at the amount of food that comes into the country, including the couple of hundred tonnes of beef that comes into Europe from outside. Someone is eating that beef. Do we know what we are actually getting when we buy a product? What is the label on a sandwich that we buy in a corner shop? Is the country of origin clear? If, for whatever reason, Mercosur comes in, how are we going to know where the additional 99,000 tonnes of beef are going? Are consumers going to be able to make informed decisions? The retailer will not stock something that no one buys. If consumers are able to make informed decisions then they are able to say they do not want to eat that, therefore, they will not buy it and it will not be stocked. They are the answers to the Deputy's two questions.

To add to what Mr. Donnelly has said, equally, the Beef Plan Movement is not recognised. It is an interesting question the Deputy asks as to why that is the case or why the participation has not been sought, welcomed or requested. If I were a cynical person – whoops, oh dear, I am – I would wonder about the sectors that we represent, because the fact is that in 2003, Ireland, in its third contribution to the United Nations, made it very clear that the suckler industry in this country would bear the brunt of climate policies. That has proven to be the case. Our industry is declining because the policies that dictate it have said that it must. We must produce less beef, lighter animals and lighter cows. It is the suckler cow population that is affected, and dairy cows have recently begun to join us. The suckler cow population has been plummeting in recent years without any comment at all. Again, if I were a cynical person, why would I want me at the table to object to the decision that has already been taken on the destruction of my industry?

The ICSA is the only organisation that has a suckler committee. There is no point in denying it. The big problem with schemes is that we are not listened to. We come in here and debate with the different parties, the Department and the whole lot but we are not listened to. They just go and do their own thing afterwards. We saw that perfectly clearly with the suckler cow scheme where the ICBF and Bord Bia had to be brought in for us to draw down our money. A lot of farmers did not bother drawing it down because they did not want to be in the ICBF or to have anything to do with stars. It was destroying their whole suckler scheme, quality cows, weanlings and the whole lot, so farmers just did not do it. I was one of the men who stood up here in this room and said that we did not want Bord Bia or the ICBF involved in the scheme. We wanted an incentive so that farmers could draw down €200 or €250 a cow. Other things could have been involved, not getting involved with the ICBF or Bord Bia. Bord Bia makes no difference to me or to a lot of farmers selling weanlings. My family and I are buying weanlings all over the country every day of the week. If I see a good weanling, it does not matter if it has two stars, three stars or one star.

Five-star animals do not get more than a four-star animal from somebody else.

A no-star animal would get far more money. That is the problem with the schemes.

The other question the Deputy asked about is food security and food health. As Deputy Kenny knows, I was at the night below in Kerry and I said that food security is a serious issue. We can all talk about it but if we get rid of farmers, we are depending on Brazilian beef coming in with carcinogenic hormones that will kill half of Europe with cancer.

That is the big thing about this whole issue. Food security is a serious issue. People do not realise it. Young people are walking away from farming. Who is going to produce the food? It will not be me because I will be finished farming in another few years. It is the same for Deputy Aird or anyone else who is here; we will all be finished farming. Who is going to produce the food? That is what we must ask ourselves. We need a good CAP to produce food. One particular company in this country brings in a load of food from Brazil every week and it is going out to hoteliers and others. Where is the Department? Can it not come along and check that food? Can it not get samples of this food? There is no such thing happening. The company that is bringing it in is well known.

It needs to be labelled. We need to know that. It is all food security at the end of the day. That is why we need to fight hard to keep the CAP money. We must have food security. We cannot rely on other countries to bring in our food.

I need to give Senator Collins an opportunity to speak. She has not spoken yet today.

I will be two minutes. I am watching a screen. I am sorry that I was not here at the start. There has been mayhem in the Seanad today with votes and arguments.

First, I thank Mr. McNamara for coming down on Monday night to our Mercosur meeting and for his contribution. I have one question, which is only on the CAP, he need not worry that it is on Mercosur. What specific changes are needed to keep the family farm viable? Would keeping CAP at its current level do it or does something drastic need to change? It is a very broad question, but that is it and then I will be gone.

I thank the Senator for her question. We have to look at the CAP payment but we must also look at another picture. You name it - everyone else is protected in terms of their earnings and the minimum wage but there is no mention of the farmer who may be at €35,000 and has borrowed so much more to live for the year. This has to be settled in such a way where they must be well above the minimum wage. The risk that they are investing in this is unreal.

It is affecting their life, future and family. The cost is a risk. There is no safeguard there. We have a safeguard in place for somebody who drives to work without any investment. The ICSA's thinking is that smaller farmers or big farmers with less income need that support to raise their standard of living. We can have quality food and everything but if they have no quality of life, they are the main spoke in the wheel.

I have a question about Mr. Donnelly's submission. The other farming organisations might give me a brief comment about it. When a CAP is agreed in Brussels, how much consultation is there with farm organisations and to what degree is it listened to by the Department or is it basically civil servants making the decision? In his submission, Mr. Donnelly asked the committee to inform him. I do not know whether we get any more information on the ins and outs of it. Our secretariat might be able to tell us that. For those with past experience of it and for the new organisations, is there input or is the die cast when it brings them in and tells them what it is doing?

To be fair, the then Minister, Deputy McConalogue, did mart tours and went out and listened directly. He deserved credit for that. It was the first time that was done. Maybe I am wrong. The big question after that was what he did with what he heard. It is one thing to listen to someone, it is another to heed the person. Did he actually take heed of what we said? He may have taken heed of some things but he certainly did not take heed of other things. The reason why I put the diagram in is because I want to know how the big chunk of money - the 400-plus billion euro - for the national plan will be formulated. The European Commission is going to work with the Department of agriculture. Will that document be shared in draft form with farm organisations for critique? These are all questions around communication. What will be made available? Where is it going to be made available so we have the facts and can read them? If we read facts then we can provide some input with a mechanism. The question remains as to whether we will be heeded. Our experience has been fairly poor on that in the past.

Mr. Donnelly mentioned the then Minister's whistle-stop tour around the country. I remember being in Sligo one night and only halfway through the tour around the country, decisions had already been made. That had nothing to do with what information was gathered. It was no fault of the then Minister. He did us justice, came around and met people. It is too far advanced by the time we get engagement to ensure we can direct it in such a way that it is farmer-friendly. We have raised this at different stages. As for support, some of the other groups present have representation on the agricultural knowledge and innovation systems, AKIS, and we may have some input into some of this stuff for the first time ever. That will bring about a change. We are part of that. That will give us a bit of encouragement but it is not enough because we are working off templates that have already been designed.

What is the name of that group?

It is another group where one can get representation on the different bodies of the workings within the Department. We can put different offers forward. At the last meeting, it spoke about doing what it did before on beef. Now it is talking about sheep, sucklers and tillage. Some people are knocking that. We will not name them but the farming bodies wanted them discussed so the farming bodies were heard. The next meeting will be about sheep while the next one will probably be about tillage. It gives us an input into where we see it going forward or where it is being taken that they can bring it back to the different relevant bodies within the Department. It is a big advantage. It is a help. It is not a full open door but it is a starting point. We have to keep opening those doors to get in there but a lot of this is preset at an early stage and we have to try to get that changed.

From having sat through the last CAP consultation committee for the current programme, the initial Commission draft does not really change significantly. The Council of Ministers will come with its approach and the European Parliament, which has co-decision, will have an opportunity to make amendments to the draft text. The Deputy asked whether they just come back and tell members of the CAP consultative committee what is happening. There is an opportunity there to make changes to the legal text through the trilogues right through until there is an agreement between those three groups, namely, the Parliament, the Commission and the Council.

It is critically important that we look from an Irish perspective. I have already said that it is a very divisive draft regulation that for the first time looks at a digressive payment. This regulation was written for the 27 member states, not for Ireland alone. It is a draft document for all member states. Ireland was unique because it had a derogation from the regulation with regard to historic payments. From Paul Savage's contribution here a month ago, it appears that there has been a move away from the entitlements to a new digressive area-based income support. That is where there is a big challenge here and that is where the committee could have a role to play to ensure that this digressive payment would start with all farmers, who must all comply with the same conditionality and stewardship in the new one. We all have to comply with the same rules and regulations. The committee could help to ensure that all farmers would get a uniform support under an area-based payment per hectare. That would be the position of the Irish Natura and Hill Farmers Association. However, the regulation allows for differentiating that payment between different types of farmers based on their agricultural activity, which is very worrying. I hope this will be looked at. Ireland definitely needs all farmers to be supported equally and fairly in this process. This is something I hope the committee takes on board.

I apologise; I was tied up with a funeral in Clare earlier. I welcome the witnesses. It is fantastic to see so many here outlining where we had serious concerns to see how we can get over these concerns. In one presentation, it was stated that CAP post 2027 must present stable, accessible and realistic support systems to meet the demands being made and the Government was asked to recognise that it either can commit to supporting the demands being made or the demands cannot and will not be met. We are well aware of farming. We are well aware that there were a lot of family farms in the past and many families were reared on those farms. I come from one myself. There were ten of us in the family and both my mother and father farmed and worked on the farm. We have moved on in life, unfortunately, and times have changed and now we seem to have mostly part-time farmers. Many of those part-time farmers would not survive without an extra job. We are trying to encourage young people to stay on the farm and continue farming. We are finding it hard to do that.

We are well aware of the age of most farmers at present. That has been announced at different conferences over the last number of years. Now is the time to try to encourage those young people to get involved in farming and to stay farming. That is vitally important into the future. We are well aware of the number of jobs created by farming and agriculture in general.

On CAP post 2027, I am sorry I have missed the meeting for the past couple of hours. What is the witnesses take about what I was saying and what will it do for the young farmers going forward?

As we said earlier, the CAP will be a 20% cut which is a big issue but we will have to overcome that. On getting in the young farmers, getting them engaged and the amount of money that has been ring-fenced, we have to look at the support system to do that but we cannot do it without a package for someone to retire or move on and allow them the space to take over. That is the big block. The land block is only the one size and getting smaller. The big thing for farmers, and especially young people, is they need security. What they need is quite different to a middle-aged farmer – they need to borrow money for a house and have credibility from their incomes. We are so controlled by things like disease, schemes and you name it that they do not have that. Consequently, that security net has to be put in there. The payments have to be looked at and increased to a certain level so that it leaves them in a viable position to go forward because unless they have that on an annual basis we are going nowhere with them and we cannot bring them on even though we want to. Part of our purpose here is to bring young farmers with us but we cannot unless we can guarantee they will have something out of CAP – and we have seen the way it has devalued because of depreciation and cuts over the years, so we are 20 years late to be discussing this. We discussed it every time. As I said earlier, we have seen it in the rising price of cattle. If the CAP payment reached the same level in the same jumps then we could talk and encourage young people into it.

You need to start by asking what do young people want. If they are going to remain farming, they need an income comparable to other sectors. The number of opportunities people have coming out of college, secondary school or whatever is a success story for the country. I heard people earlier talking about minimum wage and so on. Minimum wage does not cut it in the context of the level of responsibilities one has running a farm. If you are a farmer in the morning you have responsibility for insurance, payroll, income tax, farm management plans, financing the farm and HR if you have employees. You have to keep up with all the rules and regulations and there is animal husbandry and health and safety. You are responsible for all those things and working 60 or 70 hours a week. Nobody in any other sector will work for the minimum wage and take on those responsibilities. Where is that income going to come from? It either comes from the price in the marketplace, which is being undermined by cheaper, lower quality products coming in from elsewhere or it comes from support. Therefore there are two choices: the price either comes from the marketplace or it comes from supports. The supports are being cut through CAP so it has to come from the marketplace. Therefore the consumer will have to step up to the plate. If they want the standard of food they are demanding they will have to pay for it.

The other thing that needs to be dealt with is the volatility in farm incomes. If I go into any other sector and take a job I can probably tell you within €500 what my income will be in three or five years’ time. In farming I cannot tell you what my income is going to be within €10,000 in six months’ time. How do you expect young people to come into that sector unless we can guarantee either a price from the marketplace or supports in the form of CAP that will deliver an income comparable to other sectors and be able to take the volatility out of it so that someone can make a business plan for their farm for the next ten, 15 or 20 years that they will borrow money based on or secure a mortgage to live on the farm or buy a house locally? These are the things that young people need – the security they need – before they will go into farming. That is why we are looking at the income volatility tool. The Agri-Food Regulator has a part to play in showing the full transparency of the complete food chain from when something leaves the farm gate to when it arrives on a supermarket shelf.

I have a much quicker answer. I think we are not solving the problem because we are not even identifying it. On the idea that we are 20 years trying to encourage young people into farming, I do not believe that we are. We are showing them all the time that food production is no longer valued in Ireland. We are trying to convince them there is a great future in ecotourism, carbon removals, greenways and growing things for Electric Ireland and calling it farming and then we ask them why they do not want to do that as a charity. We have made it very clear that the priority of CAP is climate and environmental concerns and food production is of secondary importance. A lad who wants to farm wants to grow food. Where is that support?

Would Mr. Slevin make a comment on that?

On farming in Clare?

There are a lot of restrictions on farmers in Clare at the moment in relation to what they can or cannot do to land.

We have already discussed designations.

I know. Unfortunately I was late coming in.

The point I made was the fact this environmental stuff was forced upon us. We had compulsory destocking in the 1980s. There was no compensation whatever. Then in the early 2000s we got the designations imposed on us. We are not allowed to do anything. You cannot drive a single post or dig a bit of a drain without contacting the NPWS and getting approval for it. I just made the point about the amount of effort and resources the Department of agriculture and our representatives put into protecting the derogation for the fertiliser, the slurry and all that kind of stuff and not a single bit of compensation for us whatever. A dairy farmer or his neighbour can apply for a grant of €90,000 to store the slurry along with the neighbour next door and I cannot dig a bit of drain to free a bit of water on my land without any compensation whatever. It is all weighted very much towards others. We are out of the game completely. We are not even recognised. Deputy Fitzmaurice asked a question about AKIS and what it meant and I did not get an opportunity to answer him. I was that AKIS meeting. The senior official in the Department said that 40,000 of us should not even be referred to as “farmers” and the term should not even be used for us. That is a senior official in our own Department of agriculture.

And what was he going to call you?

He was going to cut us out of it completely. He did not need us. He wanted our land for nature and for Sitka spruce – that is what he wanted. To allow the milk to flow. It is as simple as that.

Did the Minister for agriculture not say during the summer that it was very difficult to see a future for all the farmers in the west of Ireland? This was in an interview with Michael Fitzmaurice. We were watching it thinking “Dude. Your inside voice”. That is a thing that happened.

It is very disappointing to hear that comment that there is not a future for farmers in the west of Ireland.

Yes.

That is unbelievable. Another thing that is happening in the west is that sons and daughters of landowners, farmers, are finding it impossible to get planning permission and all the more if they are located on a national road which is totally crazy. I am aware of a farmer who has 200 acres whose two sons had to buy sites elsewhere in order to build a house. Otherwise they would not have been able to get a house. He was on a restricted route - a national road. That is desperate altogether. It is very hard to encourage farming when the likes of that is happening.

I thank Deputy Cooney. He has the last word. I need to bring the meeting to a conclusion. I thank everyone. We have had a wide-ranging discussion. There were a number of questions which may have come thick and heavy which witnesses may feel they did not have the opportunity to answer fully. The option is available to them if they want to send on any further points before Friday and the committee will go ahead to make that political contribution before Christmas. The aim is to get that into Brussels as early as possible so they can have the most influence possible on the shape of the CAP as it is going ahead.

Have all farm organisations been met at this stage?

Every farm organisation has had the opportunity to participate. We are making sure there is an opportunity to make written submissions as well if people feel there are other points to be made. We need to receive those this week to give us the opportunity to make our submission to Brussels before Christmas.

Will our submissions go on to Brussels?

Our submission will go in, and it will be informed by the witnesses' submissions.

Our submissions stay with the committee and do not go any further; currently anyway.

That is right. We are making our submission to Brussels. The witnesses' submissions will be on the web as part of our proceedings and the documents associated with the meeting.

The committee's report to the Commission----

We will be making our political contribution before the end of the year.

Will that be on public record as well? Will we be able to see it?

Yes, that will be published. I thank the witnesses for their contributions. They are valued.