Payments on sheep must be preserved

There is now widespread opposition among sheep farmers to the proposal by Agriculture Minister, Simon Coveney, to integrate the sheep payment into the Single Payment Scheme.

Co. Galway IFA Chairman, Pat Murphy, said that if the Minister was serious about sustaining and growing the sheep sector, the Sheep Grassland Scheme needed to be ‘ring fenced’ away from the other payments.

He said that over the course of the next couple of weeks, the IFA would be making their case on the Sheep Grassland Scheme ‘crystal clear’ to all local election candidates in the county.

“What we need is a continuation and an improvement in the Sheep Grassland Scheme that will help farmers to stay in the business and to encourage young farmers to go into sheep,” said Pat Murphy.

He said that with the ‘convergence’ of payments in the new CAP, from 2015 to 2019, while some farmers on low money would go up, most farmers would be suffering cuts in payments over that time scale.

“What we want to ensure is, that the farmers who are committed to sheep, end up being the benefactors of this scheme. We think that this should be a more desirable and achievable solution for the Minister,” said Pat Murphy.

In the Sheep Grassland Scheme, farmers received a maximum payment of €10 per ewe, with an overall ceiling of €2,100 applying.

However the highest payment ever reached was €9 per ewe, while last year due to cuts, it dropped down to just over €6 per ewe, according to Galway IFA Sheep Chairman, Michael Murphy.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.