Irish farmers cannot be sacrificed or be collateral damage in the Government’s drive to secure a deal on the EU budget and the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) has warned.

“No deal is better than a bad deal,” IFA president Francie Gorman told a CAP meeting in Claremorris, Co Mayo, on Wednesday evening.

Gorman reiterated the IFA’s position that the current budget proposals – which would cut CAP funding by 22% to €300bn, while massively increasing the EU’s overall spend to more than €2.1tn – were totally inadequate and this needed to be addressed as a priority.

The EU presidency meant Ireland had to act as “honest brokers” in the negotiations around the EU budget and CAP, Gorman conceded, but he stressed that farmers still wanted “delivery” on their key concerns.

The meeting heard that CAP payments could potentially hit a base of €130/ha if the current budget proposals are given the green light and that the cuts in spending will potentially cost the farm sector as much as €400m a year from 2028 to 2034.

“There is no county in the country going to gain out of this, it is an absolute disaster,” Gorman said.

Potential job losses

The IFA’s Shane Whelan said the economic loss for Connacht would of the order of €66m per year at farm level if the CAP payments fall to a base of €130/ha.

This would result in a loss of almost €95m per year in the broader economy of the province and could result in more than 700 job losses.

IFA general secretary Damian McDonald and Liam McHale from the association’s Brussels office outlined the complex nature of the current negotiations, the tight time schedule for framing an agreement and the mounting budgetary pressure due to demands for increased defence spending.

“The fear factor in [EU] countries close to Russia is palpable,” McDonald told the meeting.

“People are genuinely afraid. So, there is massive political pressure being put on to increase the EU’s defence capacity,” he said.

“There is no doubt, to get an overall EU budget agreed, there will have to be a commitment to put a significant amount of it into defence,” he added.

Hike

McDonald said Ireland and countries such as France will be arguing for an increase in the overall EU budget given the serious hike being sought in defence spending.

The EU outlay on defence is forecast to balloon to €130bn over the next six-year term (2028-2034), up from €30bn in the last budgetary period, the meeting heard.

In response to questions from the floor, Francie Gorman accepted that an increase in the overall EU budget was already being dismissed by member states such as Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands – who were known as “the frugals” – and that these countries are actually looking for massive spending cuts.

However, the IFA president questioned the motivation of those seeking such spending cuts.

“If they [the frugals] want this project to survive and they want Europe to remain strong, then it can’t be done on the cheap,” Gorman said.

The IFA team insisted that the budget for CAP would have to be pushed beyond €400bn, at a minimum, and potentially as high as €500bn to maintain a vibrant farm sector across Europe.

Gorman said the next two months will be critical in the campaign to secure a CAP budget that will underpin the future viability of Irish agriculture and he urged farmers to engage with the IFA CAP hub to inform themselves of the scale of the proposed cuts.

Reacting to the presentation, Eddie Davitt of Sligo IFA bemoaned that the EU was now more interested in supporting the production of “bombs and bullets” than food.

Meanwhile, well-known Mayo farmer Sean Clarke urged the IFA leadership to be “very careful in its use of terminology” when calling for CAP payments to be directed towards active farmers.

Suggestions that CAP payments to pensioners could be affected under the new proposals also stirred a lot of anger.