The IFA is warning that it is to ramp up its tractor protests, targeting county council meetings around the country.
The campaign comes just two weeks after the IFA held a nationwide protest in solidarity with their EU counterparts. The message of the campaign is ‘Enough is Enough’, with farmers fed up with overregulation and red tape in their industry.
IFA president Francie Gorman says the announcement last week on ACRES payments following its meeting with the Minister goes some way towards addressing the payments debacle and the general anger amongst farmers overregulation and over-complicated schemes.
He added that there is huge frustration among farmers on the ground about the way they’ve been treated by the political system. “We’ve decided that for the next phase of our campaign, we’re going to target county council meetings around the country and the message to our politicians is that enough is enough.”
The Irish Farmers Journal is reporting that the Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue has moved to bypass the Department’s own IT system and payment mechanisms to pay 26,000 farmers waiting for delayed ACRES money.
Farmers in the general stream will be paid €4,000 and farmers in the cooperation stream will be paid €5,000 by the end of the month.
According to the paper, these flat-rate interim payments will be made directly from the Government and through a separate delivery system to ACRES. The interim payments will be clawed back from farmers’ ACRES payments when they are eventually issued. Minister McConalogue made a commitment to the Irish Farmers Journal that the 26,000 interim payments will be made by the end of February.
