Common Agricultural Policy
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-19
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Martin Kenny (SF), Sligo-Leitrim

I thank the Minister. I appreciate we are at an early stage in negotiations and they have to take a route through all of this. The budget, as I said at the outset, is the key and what most farmers are concerned about, in that we see the budget being eroded. In every CAP negotiation for the past number of decades, we have seen that happen and that needs to be very firmly fought against to ensure we keep the budget in place so farmers can have reliability into the future. That is one of the big things for a lot of people. We talk about generational renewal but when people go into farming, they want to see a future in it. Part of that future is that they have to have a reliable and stable future and they know payments are going to be available to them.
On generational renewal, the Minister mentioned how we determine what is a farmer. What is a full-time farmer? What is the farm family? How is that put in place? I was concerned to see the Minister's colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Michael Healy-Rae, in the changes to the forestry programme, suggested that for people to get the forestry grants, they would only need to have one year of payments. That is opening the door for corporates, companies and all kinds of people to be allowed to buy land up and to compete with other farmers.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:45+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-19