Hundreds of penalty notices have been issued to commonage farmers whose land was illegally burned during the closed season this year.

The Department of Agriculture has written to those affected, detailing the area of land that was burned and which will be deducted from their Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) applications.

The farmers can either accept the deduction or give notice that they intend to appeal the deduction.

An emergency meeting of commonage farmers took place in Achill, Co Mayo, on Wednesday to address the issue, hosted by the INHFA.

While the amount deducted from each commonage and each farmer varies, in some cases the deduction amounts to almost the full commonage area.

INHFA Mayo chair Gerry Loftus told the Irish Farmers Journal that the Department of Agriculture has notified shareholders in one commonage of 6.8ha that it intends to deduct 6.2ha for burned land.

“It will obliterate that commonage altogether,” he said. “It is totally unacceptable. People here are totally dependent on sheep farming and commonage land. It’s a huge amount of money to take from farmers and the local community.”

“Last summer when that land was on fire, every single person on the island was out helping to put them out and now they are being penalised,” said Loftus.

Concern

He said there was major concern about whether the BPS penalty would also be applied to other area-based schemes such as GLAS, which would cost farmers even more.

The INHFA has sought a meeting with the Department of Agriculture.