Retirement scheme fails farmers
1. To work towards resolving the many problems encountered by farmers since joining the scheme.
2. To foster good working relations with all ministers, department officials, media and all other farm bodies in order to promote the common good and betterment of all farmers in the ERS.
Seasoned, competent lawyers and agricultural advisers find it increasingly difficult to decipher the complexities and the changing rules and conditions governing the ERS.
These altering conditions are to the detriment of the financial well-being of ERS farmers. Conditions that require urgent attention remain untouched.
These issues include non-indexation of pensions and the deduction of other pensions from the ERS pension; a prohibition on full forestry grants after finishing with ERS, and the income limit imposed on young lessees when leasing lands under the scheme.
All these issues require urgent rectification. The beleaguered farmers in the ERS are baffled by the sustained attacks on the scheme and, in particular, the issue of entitlements.
The decoupling of direct payments from production changed the CAP in its totality and the imposition of the single farm payment has created perilous problems for ERS farmers. The authors of the mid-term review contemptuously ignored these farmers.
Amid great fanfare on April 1, 2004, the then minister for agriculture announced that he and his officials had obtained some favourable concessions regarding entitlements for farmers in the ERS. Farmers around the country were most grateful but cautiously optimistic.
Since Fool’s Day 2004 these concessions have been eroded and the leasing of entitlements by ERS participants should receive urgent attention. The present minister and her officials, at no monetary cost and without impinging on the rights and privileges of others, could easily rectify this cause of serious anguish to farmers in the ERS.
James Beirne
35 Wolfe Tone Street
Sligo
