Victor Boyhan Backs Tax Relief and Rural Planning for Young Farmers

Thank you very much. First, I want to welcome all of the Young Sheep Farmers Forum. I am highly impressed by your work, your energy, your professionalism, and it's great to see young farmers here at the very heart of our committee. You know, we're fiercely committed to it. We've had MACRA in, so we've had a lot of talk for MACRA, particularly in the area of the land mobility body, so I'm not going to go through that. I just really want to give my time over to you, so I'm going to ask you to focus in individually, or whatever you think, Michael, in relation to some of the issues. I think it's exciting, and Mount Bellew is a particularly good college. I know it very well. I know many of the staff there. I'm in it quite a lot, and I think it's important to see, and it's good to see, this sort of partnership that is coming from the college and from young farmers. So, I mean, I'm just going to touch on one-liners here, and then give it over to you, because I want you to use most of this time. I think the intra-family land rental tax relief is particularly important. You might just tease out one or two examples of where you would like to see that change. MACRA, as I say, has dealt with statutory land mobility, and we've dealt with that. Rural planning. That is clearly a big issue. We know that since 2005, there's been no rural planning guidelines. Despite all the promises by successive governments, we have no planning. So, clearly there's an issue, and that's something that comes into my desk every day of the week, about young people who wish to stay on the family farm, or stay in close proximity to their family farm, and their parents, particularly elderly parents. And that ties in, of course, to the repopulation of rural communities. It ties into the concerns of the GAA. Parish life, community life, there are towns and villages around this country that are dying on their feet, because young people can't live there, or are not permitted by restrictive planning laws. And I'm not saying willy-nilly planning, I'm talking about proper sustainable planning, but we have an issue, and I'd like to hear that. Maybe you might talk on that. I note your support for the private agricultural college funding review. It's something I had never thought about before, so I'm not going to ask you to go into that, but I think that's an important new dimension that you're bringing to the table here today. And then in relation to the sheep improvement scheme flexibility, you talk about this flexibility. Explain to us what you mean by greater flexibility in the scheme, because I think that is important. And finally, in relation to the price bonus for young farmers, I think that's a particularly good idea. It's important. I think we have to take sectors out that need extra support, and young farmers is one of them. And that bonus scheme is something that I think is great. I commend it. But finally, I want to commend you, because I see a freshness about your approach, and I think you're promoting it yourself, which is really important, but also the professional way you have set out what matters, what needs to be proposed, what are the benefits of that, the objectives of that. And I think that's key in your delivery and the very professional documentation that you've sent into the committee. So I think you can be assured from me, and I'm sure from everybody else, that it will become part of our work programme, so we can pick out elements to progress faster than others. So I'll give the time over to you. Thank you. Thank you. I suppose to touch on the first issue with the tax relief, I suppose at present, the four of us here see our future as part-time farmers, and that's the unfortunate reality. We need that outside income to bring in to afford us financial sustainability. I suppose the relief itself, at present, Darren, my colleague here, if I offered Darren's father a lease agreement, he gets that money tax-free when there's no inter-family relationship. Whereas if Darren approached his father and was saying, I'd like to take a lease over five, seven-year period from you, that money then becomes a tax expense for his father. So I suppose what we're looking for is for fairness and transparency, that we want to keep young people in farming, and I suppose that's one step that we can take. I suppose even it's a road test for succession in that regard, it affords us as the next generation to maybe take a portion of the land of the home farm and try and make that a workable asset for us. I suppose it also allows older generation the ability to see how we perform and maybe reinforce the idea in their head that yes, it's time for me to maybe take a step back and that the next generation are capable of that. I suppose you touched on planning there. It's a big issue, I suppose, I'm Roscommon, colleague Darren is my own, colleague Aoife has gone and Nicky has killed there, and it's all over the country, it's an issue. There's an awful lot of young people going abroad, moving away from home. I suppose we were out of two farmers, Brendan Joyce and Martin Joe Kerrigan. I suppose they're over near Darren, so I might hand over to him just to explain their story and the experience they've had with land. Thanks Michael. Yeah, well I suppose as you said, rural Ireland, sure, it's the heartbeat of Ireland, it's where the tradition is, that's in Ireland. But myself, I come from outside Westport, a rural village, so I'd like to think I'd be able to stand up and say I'm from a rural area. But with Keepec, over the nine months we'd done certain site visits, and two of them was, as Michael said, out to Glentraig, outside Clonbarra and Connemara. And it was a lovely, great day out there, I'm sure you wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the country. But we asked, what's the biggest problem out here today? And the farmer told us, well the creche is closed, the school is struggling, they're even offering money for people to take students in. But the worst thing is, no one can get planning in our road, in the valley, and it just didn't make sense. And then we went further on to, it was Oorwich, between a recess in Clifton, pure countryside, like you're not hitting any big town or city there. But it was the same thing, it was out in the countryside, and the number one problem was planning in the area. And if you take it, if you can't get planning in them areas, like you have a local mart nearby, Ma'am Cross, that's a pure social aspect for older farmers and younger farmers too, going forward hopefully. But if there's no mart there, and no social site for that, you link it on further, there's no co-ops for meal, it works out to be no work in the factories for people, local shops, local post office, it all links in, all together, and it all comes from the countryside. If there's no one there farming, it's going to have a reoccurrence on the whole economy, all over Ireland, not just out in Connemara for instance, or down up in Ballantraga and Donegal or South Kerry, it's all over the country, it's going to link in with. So I suppose what we were proposing, like a realistic planning for a young farmer, like within eight weeks that there'll be a site visit, and it's not six to eight months waiting for someone to come out, and you're pushed out, and you're pushed out, and you're pushed out, and that it's realistic, and we just stated sort of, if your parent or yourself had submitted a BIS or a similar application within the last ten years, that you should be entitled to a general house, not just, and we're not saying a mansion, so to say, but a general house, a living house, and it all comes back to animal welfare also. You can't be caving the cow or lamb the owls if you're half an hour away and getting out, they're not going to wait, like the lamb's going to be dead in the ground. So it all comes back to the realistic side of it. So that's sort of what we're proposing in that sense, realistic. Thank you very much, Darren. Thank you, Michael. Just to, I suppose, add on to that point, we all saw at the time the foot and mouth, and we saw particularly on the hill farms where the sheep had to be destroyed, we lost all that knowledge. The sheep lost their knowledge of the hill and took the farmers a long time to train those sheep back in. So if we lose the farmers in the west of Ireland, we're losing this body of knowledge. I suppose you mentioned there just on the CIS, on the reference number, I suppose farmers over the last number of years have been let down by scheme requirements and specifications. It's definitely something that needs to be looked at and get more farmer involvement in that.