Farmers claim pension scheme biased

Farmers have described as "blatant discrimination" the decision to exclude them from a new scheme, which comes into force next month, allowing pensioners earn up to €100 per week without having their pension entitlements affected.

The Irish Farmers Association estimates that 15,000 elderly farmers and farmers' widows will be affected. It is seeking urgent meetings with the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Séamus Brennan, and the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen.

"This is a priority issue for us," said Eddie Downey, chairman of the national farm businesses committee with the IFA. "It's clearly discriminatory and particularly so at a time when many elderly farmers are finding it so difficult to make ends meet."

He said he wanted to raise the issue with the two Ministers in advance of the new scheme coming in at the end of September. The issue would be a prominent item in the IFA's pre-budget submission, he added.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Social and Family Affairs confirmed that the new scheme, announced in last December's Budget, would be introduced on September 29th, allowing people in receipt of the non-contributory State pension, the non-contributory widow's pension and the non-contributory pension to earn up to €100 and keep their full welfare payments.

This would not, she confirmed, be available to the self-employed, including farmers.

The reasoning was that the new €100 disregard was "intended as an initial incentive to facilitate non-contributory pensioners who wish to continue working, or to re-enter the workforce".

She said farmers and other self-employed people were intentionally excluded from this new scheme.

"Apart from providing an incentive to take up employment, this approach recognises that persons in employment incur additional expenses such as travelling expenses and clothing consequent on the employment.

"In contrast, any expenses necessarily incurred in carrying out any form of self-employment are always disregarded when calculating means from self-employment," she said.

The exclusion of farmers and other self-employed elderly people has been strongly criticised also by Sinn Féin. The party's agriculture spokesman, Martin Ferris, said the principle behind the broad scheme was "good" and would "go some way to addressing the issue of poverty among pensioners".

"However, the fact that farmers in receipt of the old age pension are excluded is manifestly unjust. It indicates a serious lack of understanding of the fact that a large number of farmers, especially those who are getting on in years, experience real difficulty in making ends meet."

He said there appeared to be an assumption that the ownership of land was a protection against poverty. "That of course is completely wrong. For the vast majority of farmers, their land is simply the means by which they earn their livelihood."