Change the nitrates order or face a costly disaster
We must assume, as well, that none of the agencies that foisted it on the country has ever bothered to reveal exactly how much it will cost.
The ICMSA estimates that the capital cost to Co Cork farmers alone will be in the region of €255 million. That cost will arise directly out of the expense involved in the provision of four weeks extra slurry storage.
That's bad enough but what's beyond the understanding of this association is that the method the Government has chosen to meet the EU commission's requirements is precisely the wrong way of doing so.
Despite the best efforts of ICMSA and all other parties who understood the issue, the Government determined to adopt an all-country approach that ensured that counties like Cork which have a tiny number of specific localities with nitrates problems were to be subject to the same restrictions and punitive costs as those areas of the country that actually have a major nitrates problem.
ICMSA was the most prominent voice that argued, proved and begged the Government to submit a draft action plan that would have divided the country into nitrogen vulnerable zones (NVZs) and non-nitrogen vulnerable zones (non-NVZs), with the restrictions of the directive to be applied only where there was a problem the NVZs.
This solution was, and is, apparently too obvious for the Government which pressed ahead with the lunacy that is the one-size-fits-all policy, a plan that guarantees the whole country will be subject to the incredible costs associated with the nitrates directive, whether they have a nitrates problem or not.
The Department of Agriculture appointed Denis Brosnan to co-ordinate the national submission in the form of a draft action plan, and despite the flaw at its very heart, Mr Brosnan made the best fist of it.
But his best efforts were not good enough for the EU commission which seems determined to inflict fatal damage on Ireland's incredibly successful food and agribusiness sectors.
In the light of the stalemate that now exists, the commission has extended to April 22 the period within which Ireland will have to submit its action programme to implement the nitrates directive.
That extension has given us one last chance to stop this absurd policy in its tracks and turn the situation around by submitting a programme that recognises there are vast areas of the country the majority of counties, in fact that have no need for nitrates regulations because they have no nitrates problem.
ICMSA has submitted a proposal to the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government and we are confident it will meet the all-Ireland requirement that the commission seems particularly keen on but will, nevertheless, permit those areas without a nitrates problem to continue farming free of the unnecessary restrictions to which the current action programme would expose them.
ICMSA estimates that the water framework directive will allow us to comply with the commission's requirements for an all-Ireland approach while permitting the most obvious and sensible response to the requirements of the nitrates directive: the designation of NVZs.
ICMSA calls on the farming community in Cork to lobby their local representatives to ensure that this plan the only sensible plan submitted is examined carefully and recognised as the way forward.
The present plan is fatally flawed and can never extract us from the hole we find ourselves in.
Contact your local representative today and demand that the Department of the Environment look at the ICMSA plan. It's not too late to turn this around.
Pat O'Rourke
President
ICMSA
John Feely House
Dublin Road
Castletroy
Limerick.
