Revised TAMS costings “hopelessly below” real cost - Kilkenny farmer Denis Drennan

Deputy President of ICMSA, Kilkenny farmer Denis Drennan, said that TAMS latest attempt to target grants at modernising farm plants, infrastructure and machinery was giving rise to more questions than it was providing answers.

After a meeting with senior officials of the Department of Agriculture, Food & Marine to discuss the terms and conditions of TAMS 3, he said: “It’s just practically impossible to work out what is going on around the issue of costings. We have to start on the basis that the Department must know that the rates under TAMS 2 were hopelessly adrift of the actual prices.

“If we proceed from that point and we accept that the Department was genuine in its efforts to reconnect the costings in TAMS some way towards the actual prices of construction materials, then we have to ask why we see the increases under a majority of headings going up by 12% when the actual inflation to be applied to these materials from the figures in TAMS 2 would have been well in excess of that.

PICTURES: James Stephens GAA Dinner Dance 2023 - Kilkenny Live

Pictures by Vicky Comerford

“ ICMSA asks again: if the Department is going to revise the costings to make TAMS meaningful and re-energise it, then would they not at least have taken this opportunity to make the costings someway realistic?” asked Mr Drennan.

He said the approach to dairy equipment was even more puzzling and pointless.
“Where TAMS 3 does make some attempt, its costings are still double-digits short of the actual costs – but at least some increase is being acknowledged. But under no less than 10 of the 15 various items under dairy equipment, we see no increase at all – absolutely nothing. So, the sector with the greatest focus on sustainability has had grants towards that end actually cut – because where inflation has run at the rates we’ve seen and grants ‘stand still’ then it amounts to a cut in real terms.

Huge unfinished house near Kilkenny border has eye opening auction price

“Family dairy farms have, yet again, been singled out by the Department to have the ‘screws turned on them’ and rather than helping that sector towards the sustainability it claims to seek, the Department has chosen to cut that sector – the ‘flagship’ export earner – adrift and hinder rather than help”, said Mr Drennan.
The Dunbell farmer concluded by asking the Department to “look again” at the Women In Agriculture scheme due to open at the end of May and make an effort to cut through any red tape that might work against women farmers accessing the scheme.