Budget will be ‘big day for agriculture’, Coveney says

Tomorrow will be "a big day for agriculture", Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney has said, pledging a "very ambitious range of taxation measures" in the budget that will strategically overhaul the agriculture sector.

Speaking in Luxembourg on the fringes of a meeting of EU agriculture ministers to discuss the fishing industry this afternoon, Mr Coveney said tomorrow's budget would unveil a strategic overhaul of taxation, which has been the result of twelve months of work between the Department of Finance and the Department of Agriculture.

“In last year’s budget we said that we would look in a comprehensive way, at all of the budget decisions relating to agriculture that have been taken over the last 30 years and look to revamp that package in a major way. […] I think you’ll see a very significant response tomorrow.”

As well as a strategic overhaul of the tax system in relation to agriculture, the Minister will unveil a number of schemes under the new Rural Development Programme.

Other measures to be included will be a support package for young farmers, a move to increase the availability of long-term leased land, and support for farmers in areas of disadvantage. The budget will also announce new measures to respond to climate change and emissions management.

Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Alex White said tomorrow's budget would be an opportunity to relieve pressure on hard pressed citizens.

“This will be the first budget of the recovery and we do have a recovery in our country, it’s slow and it’s tentative and I wouldn’t make huge claims for it, but it’s definitely a recovery,” Mr White said at an event in Co Offaly today.

“We want to make sure that we don’t have anything that would endanger that, but we also want to have a regard to the fact that people have suffered enormously in the last six years, their living standards have fallen markedly, many people have suffered a huge amount,” he added.

He said “investment in the future” would be the focus of budget decisions for his own department, pointing out that both energy and communications policy would require significant investment in infrastructure in the future.