Support for farmers alone `unjustified'

There was an unanswerable case for the extension of the Family Income Supplement to all self-employed, including low-income farm families, the Fine Gael spokesman on social affairs has said.

Mr Jim O'Keeffe said giving the Family Income Supplement to the farmer alone was not justified.

Small farmers had a valid case but so also did small shopkeepers and service providers living on the margins.

The proper approach was to extend income support to all the self-employed, whether in urban or rural Ireland.

The Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs, Mr Ahern, had estimated the cost of extending the scheme to the self-employed with children would be £30 million in a year.

But this cost assumed a 100 per cent take-up, which was unusual in income support schemes.

After a lengthy discussion of the crisis in agriculture at yesterday's parliamentary Labour Party meeting, the vice-president, Ms Roisin Shortall, said members believed it would be short-sighted to attempt to resolve the crisis only by increasing direct payments to farmers.

At this point, she added, agriculture needed a long-term plan which would ensure the sustainability of the maximum number of family farms.

The Minister for Agriculture should initiate a national conference on agriculture which would involve all farmers' interest groups, retailers, traders, consumers and politicians, Ms Shortall said.

She also suggested the outcome of such a conference should form the first step towards drafting a White Paper on Agriculture.

The Democratic Left leader, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, said that if the public was sceptical about the difficulties facing farmers, it was because people had heard Mr Parlon's predecessors, year after year, forecasting doom after every wet day and disaster with every temporary fall in the price of cattle.

He said temporary crises in farming should not be solved by swallowing up resources through an ill-considered extension of the FIS at a cost of possibly up to £70 million at the expense of carers, pensioners and the health services.

The genuine difficulties facing farmers with small holdings would not be overcome by raiding the coffers of the Department of Social Welfare under the guise of extending FIS to farmers and the self-employed, Mr De Rossa added.