DEAR EDITOR,

I see the runners and riders have been summoned to the startline of the next CAP plan by European Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski.

In the most recent census, 61,473 people consider themselves to be farmers in Ireland, but yet 123,000 received BISS payments last year. The Irish proportion of the CAP budget is not big enough to lazily broadcast across the entire country for specific political gamesmanship. Money needs to be focused on the financially sensitive family farm – the guys and gals with muck under their fingernails.

Is this an opportunity to get rid of the communist model? We need to modernise the CAP to give it to farmers who are actually producing the food in an ever more regulated business.

We need to look forward. There is significant change on the horizon regarding how we do our business from an environmental viewpoint. We need to direct money towards the aforementioned 61,473 in order for us to meet our environmental obligations.

Otherwise, we will have a decommissioning of our industry by bankruptcy.

If we want a healthy mixed industry, we need a simple system that actually replicates what’s happening on the ground.

As one of the individuals that kick-started the Irish leg of “enough is enough” campaign, we haven’t gone away you know. We just got busy.