MACRA NA FEIRME used the platform of its annual conference in Galway this weekend to pile pressure on the Government to reverse the Budget decision suspending the installation aid for young farmers and the early retirement scheme.
Macra, which represents young farmers and rural people, plans a further rally in November to have the decisions reversed and invited the Minister for Agriculture, Brendan Smith, to attend. Macra president Catherine Buckley told the Minister that taking away the €15,000 aid for young farmers starting up in their businesses and the €15,000 annual payment to retiring farmers was "a major step backwards".
"Farm restructuring and the demographic structure of Irish agriculture must be top of the Minister's agenda and the recent increases of students attending agricultural colleges presented a great opportunity to turn the tide," she said.
"The Minister must not turn his back on these qualified young farmers," she said.
Mr Smith, who had formally opened the conference which was attended by over 1,500 young people, listened for 90 minutes to complaints from young delegates.
He was told there were dozens of young people who had left jobs to go to college to qualify for the schemes so they could take over their family farms and now this would not happen.
The Minister was told that some of the people doing their two-year course would be too old to qualify under the terms of the scheme if it was reopened and a Waterford delegate said he knew of a man in this position. One speaker, Ann Doyle from Wicklow, accused the Government of ignoring agriculture and looking after "builders and stud farmers". This was now impacting on agriculture which was a "real industry" which had been delivering all the time.
Br Michael Burke of Mountbellew Agricultural College asked how the Minister could tell people who had left full-time jobs for agricultural education that they no longer qualified and their parents could not retire.
He described the suspension as "savage and immoral".
Thomas Farrelly of Meath Macra accused the Government of "picking on the young and the old" and Joe Healy of Athenry accused the Minister of being "smug, patronising and inaccurate".
Healy, a former Macra president, also said Mr Smith had been "picked on by the Cabinet as the youngest kid on the block" in allowing the schemes to be suspended.
The Minister said he was attempting to be honest with the audience about the decisions which had to be taken very reluctantly. Asked if he could give an assurance that when money became available the schemes would be the first to be reopened, the Minister replied: "I am being fair. I am saying I attach particular importance to the schemes. Is that fair?" There were shouts of "No, No" from the audience.
There were 600 applications for the scheme with the department and they would qualify if they were found to be in order, he said.