The possible inclusion of scrub in the definition of an eligible hectare has been welcomed by ICSA president Dermot Kelleher, who has said “common sense finally seems to be taken hold”.

As revealed by the Irish Farmers Journal this week, the Department of Agriculture has proposed that scrub and other non-agricultural features be included in the definition of an eligible hectare in the next CAP.

“I have given the past 10 years fighting the injustice of red lines being drawn on land parcels, the effect of which is to penalise farmers on more marginal ground and actively damage biodiversity at the same time,” Kelleher said.

“I was a founder of the disadvantaged area farmers’ legal challenge which has spent a long time trying to establish that penalising farmers under the LPIS review by drawing red lines around every tree and bush was unjust.

“The Department has not been able to defeat this challenge to date but legal talks are ongoing. I am pleased now that common sense finally seems to be taking hold.”

Biodiversity

Kelleher said there cannot possibly be a CAP that proclaims biodiversity as a central goal and then penalises farmers who already have biodiversity on their farms.

“We are not talking here about land that is not actively farmed but land which is grazed. Apart from the inherent contradiction, millions of euros of public funds have been wasted in employing people to gaze at satellite images and draw red lines, even to the extent of excluding tiny fractions of a hectare.

“This is then followed by more time wasting with on-farm visits where officials wasted days amending these red lines by tiny percentages of the tiny fractions of a hectare originally ruled out,” he said.

The ICSA president said the whole process was clearly discriminatory for farmers on variable land types.

“ICSA believes that it is time to end this insanity. It is also insane to exclude internal farm roads which are an essential element of land management for many farmers.

“ICSA wants every effort made to ensure that the red lining process is predominantly scrapped in the new CAP so that land parcels which are being actively farmed are not subjected to endless re-drawing and reduction,” he said.