The environmental permit system being proposed by the European Commission for farms with 150 livestock units or more is a "ruinous idea", according to Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) president Pat McCormack.

He said that it will move Ireland’s family farm system towards "destruction" and appealed for some degree of logic to be brought to the debate immediately.

McCormack said the proposal showed "the extent of the disconnect" between bureaucratic abstraction and reality.

'Alarming inflation'

"It was almost impossible to conceive a proposal that had less basis in reality than one designed to attack family farms producing food sustainably in a period of increasingly alarming inflation on the basis of a directive governing industrial emissions," he said.

McCormack argued that the one constant factor in the problems affecting Irish farming and agri food is the idea that the answer to underlying problems is simply heaping more and more irrational and costly regulation on farmers, while everyone else in the supply chain is just left to do their own thing.

Farmers in Ireland are fed up with multiple agencies issuing multiple forms to be completed and multiple regulations to be met

"It is very easy for people not involved in a sector, and who personally will not be impacted by the proposals, to bring forward regulation after regulation and without any care or consideration for the unnecessary pressures being placed on farm families in terms of workload, farm management and farm income," McCormack added.

He also argued that this proposal is possibly "the most counter-productive" of a long line of damaging and destructive ideas.

The ICMSA president said that farmers in Ireland are fed up with multiple agencies issuing multiple forms to be completed and multiple regulations to be met.

'Mind-boggling'

"The only people paying for this growing and hugely expensive regulatory apparatus were the farmers and the idea that farms could now be regulated under the industrial emissions directive was mind-boggling," McCormack said.

Industrial-scale farms wouldn’t be the ones struggling to meet the regulatory costs involved in these bizarre ideas, it would be the family farms - the very ones we need to preserve - that would be left struggling to meet this latest layer of regulatory costs, he said.

"This must not happen and [the] ICMSA and farmers in general demanded that their politicians signalled a categoric rejection of this ruinous idea," McCormack concluded.