Farming organisations accused of failing members facing pensions poverty

THE EU has been creating schemes which are not being implemented as expected. In the case of the farmers’ early retirement scheme, changes were made to the terms and conditions while the EU Commission and the Department of Agriculture each lays the blame with the other.

Mary Coughlan, when agriculture minister, ignored the findings of the Joint Oireachtas Committee of Agriculture & Food and of the Petitions Committee in Brussels by failing to address the difficulties cited by them that she had promised to rectify.

Deliberate and systematic discrimination and intimidation have been practised by officials against a certain category of retired farmers. In 1997, almost mid-way through the first retirement scheme, the Department of Agriculture, in connivance with the departments of Finance and Social Welfare, changed the terms and conditions whereby all national retirement pensions, except where spouses were joint owners of farms, were henceforth deducted from the EU farm retirement scheme. This created unplanned poverty and deprivation for many farming families.