The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) believes the Government’s “inability or unwillingness” to accept that the difficulties in getting young people to farm is directly linked to collapsing farm incomes.

Commenting on the announcement of a commission on generational renewal in farming, ICMSA president Denis Drennan said the ever-increasing regulatory pressures meant that any such commission was “an exercise in futility”.

“There’s something very dispiriting and discouraging about the Irish Government pretending that there’s something mysterious or unknown about the failure to get new generations into farming,” Drennan said.

“The reason why the children of farm families don’t want to follow their parents into farming is because those kids see the hours and years of hard work and stress and official indifference and calculate very quickly that there are easier and better-paid careers in almost any other sector.”

Raising supports

Drennan said that “a perfect example” of the Government’s capacity for self-delusion was provided by their management of ‘flagship’ environmental schemes.

“Real support would mean raising the scheme payments in line with inflation and costs. It would mean increasing the scheme payments for farmers in the same way as the politicians and civil servants do for their own salaries and pensions,” added Drennan.

The ICMSA president said that for the first time in his experience, he was hearing of parents actively dissuading their children from taking over farms that had been in the family for generations.

“Those young generations have much more options than we had - and they’re exercising them. If they’re the children of a dairy family, they don’t see why they should have to work a 60-hour week for roughly half the minimum official hourly wage, so they’re not going to do it.”