The Fine Gael leader has criticised the Common Agriculture Policy and the attitude of the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, to its reform.
"The CAP is gradually turning the agricultural community of Europe into an equivalent of inhabitants of a native American reservation in the Mid-West," Mr John Bruton said yesterday.
"That is not what farmers want. Farmers want the freedom to farm, to produce, to buy and sell and to make their own decisions as independent people.
"Independence is something that they have had through generations. They do not want to become the pensioners of the European Union which, unfortunately, is what farmers are being forced to become," he said.
Mr Walsh had adopted a passive approach towards the Agenda 2000 proposals to reform the CAP, setting up four advisory groups consisting of vested interests whose principal focus was short term profit, Mr Bruton said.
This was the wrong way to go because the problem with Irish agricultural policy was that it had been dominated for years by short-termism of the kind that would get full play in the Minister's four advisory groups.
"The Minister should have shown leadership. He should have drawn up his own long-term plan for the future of full-time farming in Ireland," Mr Bruton said.
"This plan should show how best as many families as possible could make a full-time living producing quality produce from the land of Ireland. The aim should be to sell at a profit in the open market, without continuing reliance on market distortions and handouts."
Mr Bruton then outlined what he termed the fundamentals. Full-time farmers should not be asked to work for less than the minimum industrial wage and their skills should be remunerated.
Farmers should have enough land to farm and if we did not face up to it there would soon be no farmers outside dairying working the land full-time.
"Everyone else will be living from the cheque in the post or off-farm income. This may be good for rural development but it is not good for farming development, and there is a difference.
"Unless the Government produces a plan to back full-time farming, Irish land, which has the capacity to feed the people of Europe, will no longer do so because its structures of production have been ossified by contradictory policies," he said.
Mr Bruton said the cheque in the post would only continue to arrive as long as the European taxpayers were prepared to pay people to live in rural areas.
The Government must take a long-term view of agriculture and farming policies must cease to be fixated on the short-term, he said.