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In 2019, then Fianna Fáil spokesperson for agriculture Charlie McConalogue committed to putting a solution in place for the 3,900 “forgotten” young farmers who missed out on top-ups and grants in the last CAP because they had been farming in their own right before 2015.
“The boat sailed on them in the last CAP and the next CAP needs to redress that,” McConalogue said.
Fast forward a year and there is growing anger among the cohort that the now Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue seems to have neatly forgotten about these same young farmers.
But it is just the latest in a long line of broken promises that the group has witnessed.
It’s a topic the Department of Agriculture has had difficulty explaining to its European counterparts because Ireland is the only country with a “forgotten” young farmer cohort.
At a time when most European countries are determined to support their young farmers, the Irish Department of Agriculture managed to let them slip through the gaps between CAP cycles.
There is also the added dilemma of having two funding issues, which the Department has always known about and shied away from.
The first is that it knows €6.7m per year is needed to bring 3,500 of the “forgotten” young farmers up to the national entitlement average of €264/ha.
The second issue is that, based on current average young farmer payments, €8.9m per year is needed to provide the 25% top-up on their entitlements to “forgotten” farmers.
There were also rules in place which prevented these “forgotten” farmers from receiving payments at the beginning of the last CAP because they established their own farm enterprise before 2015.
But, in 2018, a change to EU Omnibus regulations came into effect which meant young farmer payments could be provided to farmers under 40 for five years from the date of their application rather than from the date they had their name down on the farm.
Minister McConalogue is well aware are of this change, since he was the one who asked the pertinent parliamentary question in 2017.
At the time, Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed said the Omnibus regulations would bring about “…a facility to provide Young Farmers Scheme payments to applicants for five years from the date of application, regardless of their establishment date”.
This could have solved the “forgotten” young farmer issue – but it was never taken up.
In a Joint Committee on Agriculture on 2 July 2019, Fran Morrin from the Department of Agriculture’s CAP entitlements division said that another Omnibus regulation came in in 2018 which made it possible to fund the inclusion of a specific disadvantaged group, such as the “forgotten” farmers, from the National Reserve, but only if a linear cut was required to fund priority categories such as young farmers or new entrant farmers.
“To date, we have not needed to do a linear cut so the possibility to pay the “forgotten” farmer cohort has not been there,” he said.
Basically what that meant was that if there was surplus money after taking care of young farmers and new entrants, then that could go to “forgotten” young farmers.
However, Morrin added that, “to date, to be honest, the money has not been there”.
Yet a linear cut was used to establish a €5m National Reserve fund in 2017 and Kenneth O’Brien, who was representing “forgotten” young farmers, said then Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed should have pushed for a linear cut in 2018 to create a fund for them.
But despite the buzz around “generational renewal”, how keen would older farmers have been to see even a marginal cut from their payments to fund a cohort of young farmers?
Despite previous promises from the IFA, ICMSA, ICSA and Macra na Feirme of support, the organisations are now quiet on the topic and appear to be thinking about the majority of their farmer members rather than one small cohort, with farm organisation sources saying the Department of Agriculture has told them there is little to no chance of redress in the next CAP.
Yet the group, many of whom are still well below their 40th birthdays, is pushing for one last showdown, exhibiting the resolve and drive most European countries would hope to nurture and reward in their next generation of farmers – not ignore them.
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