DEAR SIR: I take extreme offence to last week’s Irish Farmers Journal headline ‘Fury over €14m land tax ... Creed under fire over tripling of stamp duty’. What a biased and exaggerated statement to make.

I am not a farmer; I don’t come from a farm but I do have a farming background and a big interest in farming.

The tripling of commercial stamp duty from 2% to 6% has nothing to do with Minister Creed’s department but is instead a means of trying to generate more tax receipts from the commercial property market so that the Exchequer has more funds available to put into the many schemes that your farmer readers avail of – TAMS, ANC, harvest 2016 emergency funding, New Entrants, etc.

There is no other self-employed sector in Ireland that gets anything like the level of grants and free hand-outs that farming gets. To castigate Minister Creed (no relation) smacks of the spoiled child who cried wolf.

Minister Creed is in my opinion one of the best to have held this brief in recent times. His negotiations in Europe on behalf of Irish farmers, his introduction of TAMS II, his input into the €150m low-cost loan facility, his lobbying on behalf of not just the dairy farmer but also the sheep farmer and the beef farmer makes him stand out as one of the best ministers ever. His opening up of the Chinese beef market and his anti-Mercusor stance has proven that the minister is indeed the Irish farmer’s friend.

My advice to you would be to urge your farmer lobbyists not to cut off the hand that feeds you because some day you will be like the boy who cried wolf.