I move:
That Dáil Éireann deplores the Government's failure to adapt the EEC farm modernisation scheme to suit Irish requirements.
It is necessary, firstly, to examine the directives which comprise the farm modernisation scheme—Directives Nos. 159, 160 and 161 of 1972. It might also be possible to include the disadvantaged areas scheme and possibly one or two others. When people speak of the farm modernisation scheme they usually have in mind the three directives mentioned. The ostensible purpose of these directives was to give a better livelihood to the people living on the land. The scheme has been in operation for the last couple of years and we have come to the conclusion that the time for radical revision has come. It is reasonable to ask anybody who makes that statement about the scheme to say on what he bases his contention and condemnation of the Government for failing to do anything about it.
The first criticism of the scheme one can make is its uniformity of application throughout the Community. It has no regard to the enormous regional differences within the Community. Leaving aside the mass of national aid which further distorts the exaggerated regional differences in different parts of the Community, the size of grant in the high prosperity areas, such as the Lowlands and wealthy parts of France and Belgium, is the same as that given for the poorer regions, such as our own country, southern Italy, various parts of central France and other marginal areas—possibly the highlands of Scotland and the hill country of Wales and England.
The Council of Ministers have on many occasions declared their intention of reducing the gap that exists between agricultural incomes on the one hand and industrial incomes on the other. They have also declared their intention of introducing greater uniformity within the farming community itself, and the application of the farm modernisation scheme failed to do that for the reasons I stated. In our case, the greatest drawback which limits the operation of the scheme is the income threshold, which this year is in the region of £2,080 and also in the method of determination of this income, which is very technical in nature and intricate and unsatisfactory in operation.
Leaving aside any lengthy consideration of what happened to farm incomes during the last couple of years, it is beyond question, political or otherwise, that the income of our farming community was dealt a shattering blow. Nevertheless, the Community have raised the thershold in the mechanical way which was ordained at the time of our entry. It must be absolutely clear to everybody that more realistic thresholds should be made available. Four out of every five farmers in this country are excluded from availing of the developing status to the fullest possible extent. Nearly always he is thrust into the "other farming" class which provides a smaller range of grants, fixed at a lower level.
There is also the extraordinary circumstance that small farmers who have a high production may find themselves classified as commercial farmers on the grounds that they have tillage operations on rented land. For that reason they find themselves limited in the amount of assistance they will get from the farm modernisation scheme. By and large the scheme seems to be steered towards the high prosperity areas of the Community rather than the reverse. In our case it would appear to be more reasonable to put the weight of their effort behind the people who have some prospects of becoming economically viable as farmers but who are excluded under the present conditions of the scheme, rather than the class that has already achieved that status.
The thinking of the Commission apears to be firmly based on what is known as the concept of the modern farm. There appears to be no contemplation of a change even for problem areas such as the west of Ireland or other difficult areas of the Community. It could be said that 95 per cent of the farmers in Connacht are effectively debarred from participation in the scheme.
Bearing in mind the concept of the modern farm, the thinking and actions of the Brussels Commission, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the hope is entertained that a great many of those people will go out of farming all together. Though I do not consider the desirability of such a thing even where there is alternative employment near at hand, as is the case in many depressed areas in Europe, this does not exist in a great many places here, certainly at the present time when we have unemployment at a level we have not seen since the foundation of the State and with no prospect in view, because of the financial lunacy of the present Government, other than an increasing roll of unemployment.
In that context it becomes all the more depressing that farms of a size that become viable are not being given it while the income level is pitched at the level it is. Another serious disadvantage is the total exclusion from this directive of part-time farmers. I have considerable experience of this. Because of comparatively recent developments in our rural economy, in my area we are fortunate in having some stable and viable industries in the southern parts of County Kilkenny. There are hundreds of men who have small holdings who are working in such industries as Clover Meats, Waterford Glass, the fertiliser factory at New Ross and other such industries. In other parts you have the same part-time staffing of such industries as Avonmore Dairies in Ballyragget where there are scores, if not hundreds, employed.
The development that is taking place in that typical area is that young men coming from farms which are not really viable establish their houses and their families on the family farms but they derive the greater part of their incomes from industrial employment, remaining part of the rural communities with their children growing up in rural environments. If this were not possible, the alternative would be that the children of those workers would become inhabitants of housing schemes in Waterford, in Dublin or Cork. This is not a development we should encourage and for that reason the assistance being given to part-time farmers should be reconsidered and the development of our small projects, usually they are small, should be encouraged actively in order to ensure that the community in which we will live will be actively and positively interested in the maintenance of our rural population. If it had no other benefit, it would act as a deterrent to the growth of dormitory towns around our cities and stabilise our rural population which has been so staggeringly depleted in the last twenty years.
I do not make a political point here. The background against which we are operating is that ten years ago 36 per cent of the male population between the ages of 16 and 24 years were working in agriculture and in the ten years since, that has fallen to 16 per cent. The exodus that has taken place in rural Ireland under our stewardship as well as that of the present Government is something we must have regard to now and we must resolve that it has gone far enough and that it must stop.
I want to refer to Directive 160 which in practice leaves it to national Governments to impose on themselves a discipline in the matter of land acquisition, land purchase, land revenue and land leasing. The only demand that is made in practice on member countries is that this discipline should apply to community members regardless of where they come from. I regret that the amount of activity in this area that has been discernible from the present Government is practically nil. There is no indication that the Government can see the dire need there is to arrest the haemorrhage of the people of rural Ireland, the almost total demise of communities and the depressing extent to which those who remain are hermits on their own land.
The pension scheme under this directive offers pensions calculated to be attractive enough to elderly farmers to surrender land so that it may be made available for the development of other farm structures. It is no good, not worth the paper it is written on for this reason: it fails to understand the psychology of the countryman, especially the Irish countryman with a history such as ours—the fight for the possession and ownership of land was so long and bitter that it has taken a place in folk memory. Every Deputy knows old farmers living in practical poverty who might be making other arrangements which might relieve that poverty but because of their ingrained love of the land they make no such arrangements.
Therefore, I suggest the Government now should consider a system under which long leases would be made, especially to farmers on the young side, through which older farmers would remain the owners of the land so that under the supervision of the land authority the land would be leased to young tenants, development farmers, for a period of about ten or 20 years. One of the things that bedevilled Irish farming has been the 11-month system. It should be closely examined now to see whether it should not be practically abandoned altogether. There will always be certain pieces of land that for particular reasons it would be necessary to lease for shorter periods, but, by and large, the notion of the 11-month system of letting should be got rid of. In that regard, not for the first time in this House, I recommend that where the Land Commission are themselves letting land which they have already acquired they would only do so to farmers who would qualify for an allotment of it. The practice is to allot it to the highest bidder who, invariably, is either one whose farm is adequate for his operations or a person who is not engaged in farming but who may be speculating in cattle, for instance. In speaking of speculation we raise a big problem. We ought collectively to make the decision that farmland is not for speculation but is for the use only of farmers; that it is not available, under any code, apart for very exceptional circumstances, in so far as people outside farming are concerned. In areas of congestion, land that becomes available for sale or for letting should be designated officially as development land and its sale should be limited to farmers who are reaching development status. I recognise that this would raise certain difficulties but when one considers the wildly-inflated prices of agricultural land, one must recognise that the possibility of the smaller farmer—the one with less financial muscle—obtaining extra land is practically nil. We are witnessing the process of the absorption of the smaller farmers throughout the country. By no means could my constituency be described as one of the poorer ones. Perhaps, from the point of view of agriculture, it is the best but even in that area the reality is that because of the inaccessibility of land to the farmers of the type I am talking about, they are being backed slowly year after year against the wall of extinction. I regret to say that even with the licence afforded to us under the 1963 Act and under EEC directive 160 of 1972, we are allowing this process to continue totally unchecked. I have never heard from either the Minister for Lands or the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries a proposal to arrest this decay.
I admit that it is not today nor yesterday the decay began. The statistic I gave extended over the period of the past ten years during which time the number of young men engaged in agriculture has decreased by 20 per cent and is continuing to decrease.
Since there is effective licence under Directive 161 for nation states to take whatever measures they consider fit to stabilise the rural population on the land, it is for us to take such measures. Pressure for this type of action is growing. I should hope that what I am saying would help to alert the people of rural Ireland to the desolation being wrought all around them. I should hope, too, to alert the Minister and his colleagues to the fact that this issue will be a burning political one in the future. It is right that we should recognise the situation and formulate plans to arrest the near destruction of rural society as we have known it. It is badly impaired already. There is an obligation on us to ensure that this desolation does not continue.
The various pension schemes have been tried. There was the scheme of a kind in the 1963 Act but that was not worth talking of. It did not work. The same applies to the pension scheme in connection with the farm modernisation scheme. The reason for the lack of success of these schemes is the profound love of the land that results in elderly farmers facing poverty and discomfort rather than signing away their land.
I am not aware that even the most modest suggestion has been made under Directive 161 which rejoices in the gobbledegook title of Socio-Economic Infrastructural Reorganisation, one of these expressions produced by the bureaucracy. What it conveys to me is the recognition that there is a need for the interlocking of the various agencies concerned with the rural community and the co-ordination of their work towards an end that appears to have been lost sight of—the stabilisation of the rural population. When one considers the marital status and the average age of our farmers, one must recognise that regardless of what we do there will be a diminution in the number of people engaged in agriculture during the next decade. However, we should have as our objective the keeping of this diminution at a minimum.
Directive 161 is voluminous in regard to educational training, industrial development and a whole range of assistances that may be provided by national governments under the general umbrella of the directive. It is necessary to bring together committees of agriculture, the IAOS, the farming organisations and possibly county councils and organisations such as the ICA so that they can identify the problems of areas possibly by counties or by regions. These organisations recognise that of farming families there will be some young men and women who will not be able to continue in farming and that for them other means of livelihood will have to be provided preferably in their immediate areas but certainly in their regions. What I am talking of is the necessity for the development of local industries, village industries and the active participation of the IDA in this quest for new industry. The Irish as a nation have acted for long enough as a reservoir of cheap labour for our neighbours in Great Britain and in other countries.
It is time we began to work for ourselves and it is up to ourselves because, no matter what the EEC may provide in the way of aid, and they have provided very substantial aid, unless we resolve to help ourselves and do it ourselves and identify our own problems ourselves the EEC will not save us. For that reason I regret there has not been a single whisper, not to me at any rate, from the Government about, first of all, the recognition of the dire problems that exist and, secondly, the formulation of methods to deal with them.
Before the recent by-election we had the Minister for the Gaeltacht announcing with an appropriate flourish of trumpets, the establishment of a western development board. The notion in itself may be well enough, but what good is the flourishing of trumpets when we are not even able to fund a decent disadvantaged areas scheme? The aids under the headage grants paid by our Government under the disadvantaged areas scheme are by far the smallest and the meanest in the Community. They must be. Anything that depends largely on a national contribution is bound to weigh against the smaller and poorer countries and we are one of them. For that reason I am quite sure the Minister is very well aware of this and I am quite sure he has been putting across the point that the concept of national aids will have to be got rid of as soon as possible. But it has not been done yet and I do not think it is very realistic for the Government to talk airily and vaguely, before by-elections only, about western development boards or any other kind of development boards unless there is something else coming as well. If Mr. O'Donnell had been willing officially to tell us what he was going to do for the people——
