The announcement that €5m will be allocated to forgotten farmers was welcomed by Galway farmer Kenneth O’Brien following last week’s budget.

Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue honoured a commitment, which he made in June of this year that a forgotten farmer scheme would be funded in Budget 2025.

O’Brien founded the forgotten farmers movement in 2015, in a bid to raise awareness and seek compensation for over 3,000 farmers who were excluded from young farmer supports.

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These young farmers lost out following the removal of supports such as installation aid due to cuts in public expenditure during the last recession.

As a result, they were then unable to qualify for young farmer supports introduced under the CAP in 2015, because, in many cases, they had been farming for five years or more.

“After all this time and at long last we’ve been acknowledged. We’re very thankful because we’ve been fighting this battle for years. It was a lonesome road. We met two previous Ministers for Agriculture and got nowhere.

“I started this off in 2015, when I discovered for the first time that I had been left out of the CAP. I made contact with the farm organisations and they told me it was done, that it was over.

“Getting an article in this paper was what got the ball rolling. We then held a meeting in the Hodson Bay Hotel in Athlone on 26 February 2015 where over 1,000 farmers attended,” he said.

“We were there as young farmers to take land and we were up against the lads who could get access to the national reserve.

“If you look at somebody who got access to the national reserve in 2015, and they got that payment for five years, they were getting around €30,000 of a payment. My payments were €1,000, which made it very hard to compete.”

O’Brien maintains that there are 3,000 genuine forgotten farmers who slipped through the cracks.

However, in terms of compensation, it won’t be a “one-size-fits-all” scenario –farmers will be compensated on a case-by-case basis, he said.