Dempsey at Large: CAP reform - what we have, we hold or ….?

So the very first proposal is a 20% cut in CAP funding. Minister Martin Heydon may be correct in seeing 80% as a good starting point, but Ireland has fundamentally changed. We have gone from one of the poorest EU member states to one of the richest. Our total number employed nationally has gone from one million to almost three million.

Emigration has been replaced by immigration. We have a low national debt as a proportion of GDP, a significant current budget surplus and a substantial balance of trade surplus.

Well over half our farms have an outside source of income, but fundamental Government policy on agriculture has not changed.

Eamon de Valera’s constitutional aspiration that as many families be established on the land in economic security as in the circumstances shall be practicable, still applies. At that stage, and up to the 1960s, land was our only resource. It provided the bulk of exports and employment. In pre-EEC days, aid to agriculture in one form or another constituted a large part of Government expenditure.

The Irish Land Commission was still active in dividing farms, so that numbers on the land could be maximised.

We were glad to surrender the financing of Irish farming to Brussels and we continue to benefit hugely from the free access to the markets EU membership gives us. But the financing from Brussels is coming increasingly with strings attached, which may not suit present Irish conditions.

I have seen no debate on what a modern agricultural policy, suitable for a modern Ireland, would look like. The initial aspirations for the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) talks of much greater flexibility for individual nation states in the allocation of money to sectors under pressure. 

I can think of several sectors in Ireland under pressure, where freedom from detailed Brussels supervision might be welcome.

Should we rationally discuss the place of part-time farmers with very low stocking rates and their eligibility for full payments? Also our tax measures have actively discouraged the passing on of farms to a new generation.

I see where the European Landowners Association has called for EU cash to go to those who will use it best, not to those who need it most. This is a totally new way of looking at the CAP. Of course we must have a European dimension to international trade, as well as plant and animal disease policies, together with rules for internal trade. But as a major net contributor to the EU budget, Ireland should at least stand back and re-examine if the old certainties and aspirations are still appropriate. Circumstances have dramatically changed.