The Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney should “put his money where his mouth is” and make €10 million available to help combat the worsening fodder crisis, according to Fianna Fáil’s Éamon Ó Cuív.
His call comes a day after Coveney announced that his department would attempt to fast-track payment to farmers to help them deal with a shortage of grass following the recent bad weather.
Responding to the move, Ó Cuív said that these steps would “not help the most urgent cases.”
“What is now needed is straight cash to assist farmers who cannot get credit and do not have enough money to feed their cattle,” the Fianna Fail spokesperson for agriculture said.
Examples of how extreme this emergency has become are farmers paying up to €80 for a bale of silage, almost four times what you would normally pay.
I have also been informed that a farmer had to sell a dairy cow for the price of a dry cow because he needed to buy groceries for his family. This is how desperate some farmers have become.
The chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Andrew Doyle TD, yesterday called for “solidarity within the farming community”, and for “farmers to resist the temptation to profiteer from the unfortunate situation”.
“Something must be done now and the procrastinating by the Minister must stop,” Ó Cuív said, adding that farmers had been “dramatically let down.”
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