THE MINISTER for Agriculture says he is “very concerned” at the number of people who have lost their lives on Irish farms this year.
Simon Coveney launched a national programme of farm safety courses at Farm Safety Village, which forms part of the National Ploughing Championships, in an effort to minimise farm deaths and injuries.
Teagasc has organised the half-day health and safety courses to help farmers to complete a comprehensive farm health and safety risk assessment, which they are required to do under health and safety legislation.
“I am very concerned that 18 persons have lost their lives on Irish farms so far this year,” the Minister said. “This is an unacceptably high number of the workplace fatalities. In addition, an estimated 1,800 farmers suffer serious injury on farms each year.”
The Irish Farmers’ Association also launched a farm safety advisory leaflet. IFA president John Bryan said the leaflet was the latest initiative in the IFA’s “Think Safety – Farm Safely” campaign.
There was another large turnout to the National Ploughing Championships in Athy, Co Kildare, yesterday, when 69,000 people braved the showers to attend the event.
Politicians were thinner on the ground but Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan, Fine Gael MEP Mairéad McGuinness and Éamon Ó Cuív, deputy Fianna Fáil leader, made it.
Mr Hogan defended his septic tank registration charges and Mr Martin his decision not to run a presidential candidate while the rest of the visitors got on with enjoying themselves.
Traffic moved better than on the opening day while the ploughing competitors welcomed the rain as it made for easier and more “tasty” ploughing, to use their own description.
Details of a second feasibility report on the re-establishment of the sugar industry were released yesterday which claimed it could be developed at a cost of €400 million. Beet Ireland, formed by a group of former sugar beet growers, said the independent report proved the viability of redeveloping the industry in Ireland, which was closed in 2006 as part of European Union reforms.
Beet Ireland said it was planned that 30,000 hectares of sugar beet production would be required to supply the proposed new state-of- the-art plant to produce crystal sugar and bioethanol, with a capacity to produce 250,000 tonnes of refined sugar and 11 million litres of bioethanol.
Growers, investors and bank finance would fund the project.
The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association used the occasion to call for tighter controls on the sale of scrap metal.
ICMSA president Jackie Cahill described as “unacceptably casual” the arrangements around the buying and selling of valuable scrap metals in the country’s commercial metal recycling centres.
Mr Cahill said the creamery association was being bombarded by complaints about “wholesale pillaging” of farms by gangs intent on stealing or stripping machinery or buildings they adjudged to contain saleable metals.
“It is literally an epidemic of theft. We’re talking about wholesale pillaging of farms, where we have groups arriving in vans and proceeding to steal whatever they want, or whatever they estimate they’ll be able to sell on.”
Alan Jagoe, the national president of the young farmers organisation Macra na Feirme, said budget 2012 must deliver the retention of both land transfer tax reliefs and young farmer reliefs, otherwise agriculture would underperform in the long term.
“Transfer tax reliefs in the form of agricultural relief, retirement relief and stamp duty relief must remain intact in their current format if we are to attract new blood into the industry and meet the growth targets set out for agriculture,” he said.
“If the Government is serious about young farmers, then the importance of a tax system that is favourable towards new entrants starting out in the sector cannot be over stated.”