The Irish Farmers' Association's rejection of new draft rules on the use of nitrates on land could endanger EU payments for other environmental schemes, the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, warned. Seán Mac Connell reports.
At its annual general meeting in Limerick, the IFA membership rejected a draft document on the nitrates directive from the Department of the Environment as being far too restrictive for commercial farmers.
The draft document on the directive, which Ireland should have ratified 10 years ago, limits the use of manure and slurry on land, denotes when slurry can be spread and has strict minimum storage requirements on farms.
During a three-hour-long question-and-answer session with Mr Walsh, one of Ireland's best known dairy farmers, Mr Padraig Walshe, told the Minister the new regulations would criminalise him.
"I run an efficient dairy farm and I guarantee there is no pollution from it, but if these regulations come into being, I will be operating outside the law.
"My only alternative is to get out of farming altogether and I may have to do that if these regulations become law," he said.
Mr Walshe said he believed the controls being drawn up for Ireland were a nonsense because they failed to take into account the climatic and growing seasons in the country.
"You have totally different growing conditions here in Ireland where grass grows for nearly 12 months of the year and places such as Greece or Finland where there is little growth for long periods of the year."
Other national executive members of the IFA also voiced their concerns, particularly delegates from Cavan, Monaghan and Leitrim, who will be forced to store manure or slurry on their farms for 24 weeks.
They said that while smaller farms were not generating the amount of manure to drive them over the limit, commercial dairy farmers would be hit hard and faced being fined and losing EU payments.
The Minister said this was a vital issue for Irish farmers, especially the 10,000 identified in a Teagasc study.
"This issue has been around in Europe since 1991 and we got a derogation from it.
"But it is not that many years ago that there was a threat to our area-based schemes by the EU because of non-compliance," he said.
That threat still existed and EU environmental schemes such as the Rural Environment Protection Scheme was vulnerable if we did not come to an agreement and set agreed standards.
The Department of the Environment was driving the issue and he was looking forward to the IFA's response to its latest draft document. He said he would work with them to get a solution.
"However, I have to warn that there must be finality of this issue because failure to find a solution will place our environmental schemes in jeopardy," he said.