Some people who had moved into west Cork seemed to be determined to stop anyone else moving in by objecting to developments, even on farms, the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, told a conference yesterday.
He told farmers who had complained about the strictness of planning laws during the information meeting on the Rural Environment Protection Scheme, that there was "a hell of a problem with planning in west Cork."
"I have a lot of cases on my books of people complaining they cannot do anything on their farms. I have spoken to the Minister for the Environment who issued guidelines on rural housing, but I wonder if they are working," he said.
"I will have to speak to him again because there is a hell of a problem. There are people who have moved into west Cork who do not want anyone else to move in and there are serious issues around planning."
Mr Walsh was responding to a number of complaints from farmers, that they were having extreme difficulty complying with the planning laws and the rigid enforcement of these laws.
A farmer who owns land on the Shannon Callows (floodplains), said he was being "evicted" from his farm because of environmental regulations which prevented him from cutting meadow until early August to conserve corncrakes.
He said the regulations protecting the endangered bird were even stricter in the new REPS 3 scheme and would mean, if he joined the scheme, that he could not cut grass on his farm until August 10th.
He said that if the conditions were not so strict, many more farmers, especially from the ranks of the 3,000 farmers on the Callows, would join the scheme, whereas now only 5 per cent of them had signed up.
The Minister, who had been launching the new environmental scheme, said he was disappointed that more farmers were not joining REPS 3 which carried enhanced payments to farmers who signed an agreement to farm in an environmentally sensitive way for a five-year period.
He said 45,000 farmers had joined the first REPS scheme, but this had dropped to 38,000 in REPS 2.
He warned that if farmers did not take up the €260 million he had allocated for the scheme this year, that money could be lost to the sector.
Payments, he said, had been increased by 28 per cent and money was now being paid on all the acreage of the farm.
He said farmers should not believe the rumour that this was the last such scheme because environmental schemes were at the heart of EU agriculture policy.
He said the revised REPS scheme was less bureaucratic than before and was more farmer-friendly.
He said he expected a fall in the amount farmers were being charged by planning consultants because there was less work involved in applying to join the new scheme.