Food Industry
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-19
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Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South

I thought Deputy Stanley was going to break into a bar of Trudi Lalor's "Lovely Laois" for a minute. I am well aware that some of the best tillage land in the country is in Laois because it is right beside Kildare. We have it too. The Deputy has many constituents, as I have, who are dependent, who are tillage farmers and are very worried about the future. They have had three really tough years due to a mixture of bad weather, income challenges and pressures and high input costs and low margin prices. At its heart has been the fact that our tillage sector is largely reliant on world market prices. Unlike the value-added piece that we have managed to introduce on our beef and dairy products, we are not in that space in tillage.
I am determined to get there. I have my €50 million supports through straw incorporation and protein aid, and the €30 million tillage sustainability scheme, which I recently launched. On top of that, it is about the value-added piece. It is about developing a quality assurance scheme for our tillage sector that delivers better value back there. It is this value-added piece that is here. In terms of the money and whether Laois is in the mix, it is up to individual companies to put themselves forward for that now. The Government has made that money available for them.

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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