The Waterford IFA county executive has put forward a motion that the IFA adopts a policy of regional convergence as part of the next CAP.

Regional convergence would require Ireland to be divided up into smaller payment regions rather than a single national area.

Draft CAP legislation states these regions can be defined as areas “faced with similar socio-economic or agronomic conditions”.

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Convergence of payments would be towards the regional, rather than the national, average.

At a national level, the average Irish entitlement value is €265/ha including greening. At a provincial level, the average ranges from €284/ha in Leinster to €222/ha in Connacht.

Regionalising

Regionalising the country would be a decision made at national level, not at EU level.

There were several European countries that operated a regional model in the last CAP.

The most extreme of these was Spain, which divided the country into 50 different regions.

The proposal put forward by IFA Waterford will be put to the next meeting of the IFA national council.

Waterford IFA dairy chair Mark Connors, who proposed the motion, said the viability of commercially sensitive full-time farmers needed to be protected.

Coupled payments

Meanwhile, IFA hill chair Flor McCarthy is maintaining his push for the association to consider coupled payments.

IFA president Tim Cullinan discussed the issue with McCarthy and commodity chairs Brendan Golden (livestock) Seán Dennehy (sheep) Stephen Arthur (dairy) and Mark Browne (grain) in recent days, along with Derek Deane.

McCarthy said there was “a clear agreement” that a “report was to be done as a matter of urgency” to look at the “drain of money from the low-income sectors into the dairy sector”.

“On Monday I spoke to the president and he said the IFA would look at coupling again and that we couldn’t go ahead with the report as it would split the organisation in two,” McCarthy said.

The IFA and chairs who attended the meeting declined to comment further.

Coupled payments would require a fund created from a linear cut to all direct payments.

The IFA’s CAP strategy committee met on Tuesday, where it is understood McCarthy raised the issue again, but got no backing.