Tillage Sector: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2025-10-15
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Fionntán Ó Súilleabháin (SF), Wicklow-Wexford

As the Minister and Ministers of State know, farmers are in intense crisis at the moment following two absolutely terrible years. Will the Government introduce a proper area-based payment tillage incentive scheme? Currently, the Government is giving €40 per acre whereas it needs to be at least €100 per acre or €250 per ha, as requested by the farming organisations that I have met with on a number of occasions. That needs to be done as a matter of urgency. Farmers are being fleeced. There are rising input costs, machinery costs, fertiliser costs, sprays, diesel and other items in the local hardware shop have gone up. They have less money to spend locally, so we are all being affected either directly or indirectly. Fertiliser prices have tripled since the Ukrainian war. How can farmers withstand three times the price?
The Government closed down our own fertiliser factory in Arklow in my local area in 2002. Just three years later, it torpedoed the sugar beet industry in the south-east and beyond. However, barley now amazingly costs the same as it did back in 1974, the year I started school and ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest. That is how long ago it is. The drinks industry uses around 300,000 tonnes of grain annually. We do not have enough grain in Ireland. At the very minimum, we should use all the Irish grain first before mass importation. Deputy Kenny just pointed out the idiocy of how Irish whiskey does not need to have Irish grain in it. I am sure the Minister will agree that this needs to be examined straight away.
Mass importation of products certainly was not the vision of the patriotic founding fathers of this country, of the Proclamation or the democratic programme of the First Dáil. They spoke about having some level of economic independence, whereas at the moment we are becoming a dependent vassal State rather than a sovereign one. Ireland has mainly stopped growing grain for human consumption. The majority of flour is imported - 69% from the UK, 11% from Germany and 8% from France. That is why I salute the farmers in the south-east last week who blockaded a boat coming into Wexford with 300,000 tonnes of foreign barley. Direct action like the French farmers engage in is something good that we can import from France. This imported grain is substandard and often has black grass, which is an invasive species. It is genetically modified and it comes with a massive carbon footprint. It does not make any sense.
With Mercosur, we are, insanely, flooding the European market with 90,000 tonnes of untraceable beef, grown in place of the rainforests that have been cut down in South America. We are saying that is a sustainable solution. It is absolute lunacy. At the same time, Irish farmers are highly regulated and over-regulated. If things do not change, we could have a food shortage in years to come.
A tillage farmer in my area, Thomas Kenny, wants to hand the baton to his son, 15-year-old Tomás, whom I taught years ago. He is a great farmer and is absolutely passionate about it. He lives for farming. Can the Government guarantee that Tomás will have a future? Thomas, the father, does not know whether he should hand the farm to his son. He could be handing him a white elephant if he cannot make money from it and does not have a livelihood. Will the Minister and the Ministers of State introduce, at the very least, a proper, area-based tillage incentive scheme of at least €100 per acre? We need it before we drive the final nail into the coffin of Irish farming and drive farmers off the land altogether, which is something we in this country have now been doing for 6,000 years. Something needs to change urgently.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-10-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:13+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-10-15