DEAR SIR:

I would like to express my disgust at the recent announcement by the DUP Minister of Agriculture Michelle McIlveen of the plan to end the Area of Natural Constraint Scheme. This decision will cost the most vulnerable farmers in the North of Ireland £20m per year.

The DUP seems to have set a course of attacking the less well-off people in order to pay for their incompetence in the RHI Heating Scheme, which just so happens will cost the taxpayers between £20m and £30m per year.

In a letter to Stormont’s agriculture committee, the minister’s officials explained that an option to fund the doomed scheme from the NI Rural Development Programme 2014-2020 would not “target support accurately to those farmers with low incomes”.

They added: “Nor was there a justifiable reason why this mechanism was needed for a particular sub-section of the rural population given the existence of the broader welfare regime.”

The minister and her department are clearly indicating that hill farmers should sign on the dole!

This is an extraordinary statement by the Department of Agriculture and one for which I hope the entire farming population holds the minister and her party to account. It all adds to the impression that hill farmers are an easy target to exploit and the Department of Agriculture, whose job it is to protect the farming industry, are in fact leading the charge against hill farmers in particular.

With Brexit looming, I am very scared for the farming industry with a minister who, even before EU subsidies disappear, has decided to make sweeping cuts to farming incomes.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time the DUP along with their Tory friends have voted against farmers’ interests, because previously they joined together to vote to cut the EU CAP budget, thus cutting the amount of money farmers had access to. I appeal to farmers and their families to make it clear in the forthcoming election that they will not stand for this attack on their industry and demand that the decision to axe the ANC scheme will be reversed.