
ICMSA’s Drennan says next Tuesday’s Budget provides opportunity to “make good on Budget 2025 commitment and Programme for Government”
Speaking in advance of next Tuesday’s Budget 2026, the President of ICMSA, Denis Drennan, has said that farmer attention will focus on the commitment given in Budget 2025 by (then) Minister for Finance, Jack Chambers to “advance an income volatility measure to support the farming sector for consideration in advance of next year’s Budget. This requires detailed consideration of complex issues of policy around how this would operate in the context of financial regulation, governance and legal structures. My officials will work with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in progressing proposals for consideration.”
Mr. Drennan said that the Budget provides an opportunity for the Govt to ‘make good’ on that commitment and also to carry through on the commitment made in the Programme for Government.
“Following our pre-Budget meeting last August with the Minister for Finance and Minister for Public Expenditure in August, ICMSA expressed deep disappointment with the Tax Strategy Group analysis of one specific proposal for an income volatility measure, and we highlighted very clear areas of disagreement with the report. We noted that the Tax Strategy Group seemed very concentrated on responding to proposals that certainly ICMSA had never advanced and that the core problem – the destructive effects of excess income volatility – had been left unaddressed. We did meet subsequently with the Department of Finance and had a constructive meeting of the possible options available to address income volatility in the agriculture sector – we made an additional Submission to the Minister for Finance following this meeting”, said Mr. Drennan.
Observing that this was a question of the Government carrying through on its own commitment “freely given”, Mr. Drennan said that that the Programme for Government had clearly identified income volatility in the agriculture sector as a key issue to be addressed. The first opportunity to do just that had already been spurned and next Tuesday gave the Minister for Finance an opportunity to ‘get to grips’ with the problem that any survey of young farmers identified as the single biggest obstacle to the generational renewal that was going to leave us without the critical number of farmers in the very near future.
“It bears repeating again and we’ll go on saying it: we simply have to come up with some way ‘smoothing out’ the incomes farmers can earn. We are competing with pharma and tech for the next generation of young farmers; they can tell them to within €10 what they’ll be earning this time next year, while we can’t guarantee to within €10,000 what they will earn. We must have a mechanism that will allow farmers to put away income in ‘Good’ years and draw down in ‘Bad’ in a way that’s tax compliant and easy-to-manage. ICMSA has set forward a proposal that will be under the supervision of the tax authorities, that would be subject to Government’s Terms & Conditions and would be available to all farmers across all sectors and would allow them this minimum degree of predictability of income and a way of managing on a year-to-year basis”, said Mr. Drennan.
The ICMSA President said it was a question of political will: the Government could decide to dodge an increasingly critical question yet again or it could do what it’s elected to do: face up to the problem of ruinous farm income volatility and solve it.
Ends 1 October 2025
Denis Drennan, 086-8389401
President, ICMSA.
Or
Cathal MacCarthy, 087-6168758
ICMSA Press Office
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