Has Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed met a Dáil deadline to report on the feasibility of a €200/cow suckler payment? The answer is, it depends on who you ask.

In a motion passed on 21 February, TDs included a request for the minister to “report back within two months to the Oireachtas on a roadmap towards targeting Rural Development Programme (RDP) underspend to suckler and other vulnerable sectors”. This was in line with the Save our Sucklers campaign promoted by the Irish Farmers Journal.

With the deadline recently passing, Fianna Fáil’s agriculture spokesperson Charlie McConalogue, who introduced the motion, has written to Minister Creed to signal that TDs were still waiting.

Meanwhile, the position at Agriculture House is that the minister provided his response last month when he addressed an Oireachtas committee on his department’s spending.

He then presented figures showing an overspend rather than an underspend on RDP schemes and rejected a €200 payment for every suckler cow.

“If we chose the option of making a coupled payment, we would be then reverting back to obliging farmers to keep any old stripper or suckler cow for the purposes of the payment, regardless of the quality,” Minister Creed said at the time. So this seems to be the final Government position.