Rural share of the suffering
With only the Departments of Environment, Community and Local Government and of Transport, Tourism and Sport suffering bigger percentage cuts in funds budgeted for next year, IFA President John Bryan had a valid complaint that the Budget flies in the face of the sector’s contribution to jobs and exports.
What stuck in Bryan’s craw was the €50m hit on farm incomes in the form of the cuts to REPS4, and changes to the terms and conditions in Disadvantaged Areas and Farm Assist.
No doubt, it sticks in Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney’s craw too, committed as he was to help those farmers who depend heavily on financial support from the state and the EU in order to stay on the land.
Earlier this year, he said many families could not stay farming if they did not have a certain amount of subsidy and support. So he knows the €30m disadvantaged area payments reduction in 2012 could adversely affect farming, and farm production.
Many of these farmers may also feel the squeeze from the cut in REPS payments by 10% for the remainder of this scheme — with no more of a commitment on its replacement scheme, the AEOS, than a promise to consider re-opening it on a limited scale early in 2012.
There are vulnerable landowners also among the 11,720 in receipt of farm assist, who will also be hit by amendments to the notoriously difficult farm assist means test, which are budgeted to save the Department of Social Protection €5.2m (about 4%).
They are among the many victims of the impossibly difficult choices for a government seeking to protect sectors which it knows can contribute to economic recovery and future growth in the Irish economy, while finding money to pay jobseekers’ payments which are more than three times the 2006 level, an increase in medical card holders of more than 500,000 since 2007, and state pensions rising at €200m per year — bills which require Government spending to fall next year and in each subsequent year to 2015.
Perhaps the future is best summed up by the warning in Budget presentations that Department of Transport funding cuts may rule out winter maintenance of local and regional roads, in a rural Ireland where many more garda stations will have to be closed due to reduced Department of Justice funding.
And there’s a lot of belt tightening to come yet.
