DAIL REPORT: Claims that the Common Agriculture Policy negotiations are a "sell-out" or that the Minister for Agriculture was "worn down" are "way off the mark", he told the Dáil last night.
Mr Walsh said Irish agriculture was "highly dependent on a strong and viable CAP and we are not serving our own interests if we bury our heads in the sand and ignore the external threats and challenges".
Fine Gael condemned the negotiations as a failure and the party's agriculture spokesman, Mr Billy Timmins, said "the Minister came home with less than he had going out". To refer to it as a balanced outcome "is simply not correct, because even with the failure, some sectors have been more severely hit than others".
His party colleague, Mr Tom Hayes, said that "today will go down as the day when the Minister finally sold out on Irish agriculture".
Thousands of jobs would be lost by the sell-out, particularly in the dairy sector, which was the "backbone" of Irish agriculture. The Minister however, rejected the "rather hysterical outbursts" about the outcome on milk.
Losses to the dairy sector amounted to less than €14 million a year, he said, but warned that the Irish dairy industry "will have to get its act together. They will have to realise that sales to intervention is not the way to build a viable industry, capable of remunerating its farmer suppliers adequately for its raw material."
He said that Ireland in the past four years had accounted for "between 27 per cent and 35 per cent of EU butter intervention intake, compared with our 8 per cent share of production" and he added that reliance on bulk commodity products was "way out of line" with countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands.
But he said that while the EU Commission wanted to cut butter intervention to 30,000 tonnes they agreed a ceiling of 70,000 tonnes, reduced over five years to 30,000 tonnes.
He said that some people suggested that Ireland "rely on the prop of converting milk into products, storing them in intervention at a cost and disposing of them to some unfortunate country which is trying to develop its own industry.
"That is not a reliable basis for the future of the dairy industry." The most contentious issue, which represented a fundamental change to the CAP, was the proposal to decouple direct payments to farmers from production.
The Minister said that the new arrangements "besides providing the opportunity to reduce the paperwork associated with direct payments and about which farmers have been extremely critical, the new arrangements provide new opportunities for Irish farmers to respond to market demands". The agreement allows individual, member-states a number of options to implement decoupling in a manner that suits their own requirements.
Mr Walsh added that the new arrangements on decoupling would allow a substantial amount of direct payments to qualify as domestic supports and therefore they could not be challenged in the forthcoming World Trade Organisation negotiations.
Labour's agriculture spokeswoman, Dr Mary Upton, said she understood the dairy sector's concerns because milk production in Ireland was seasonal and that could not change.
That "precludes dairy farmers from certain options in terms of alternative fresh dairy products throughout the year". She said the small print had "yet to be digested" and called for the Minister to discuss in detail the impact of the reforms with the various farming sectors, as soon as possible.
"The different farming enterprises and the varied size of farm holdings render it impossible to design a 'one-size-fits-all' response to the differing farming interests."
Mr Dan Boyle, the Green Party spokesman, said the negotiations were yet again about "retrenchment and fighting a rearguard action, trying to avoid what has seemingly been the inevitable direction of EU farm policy in recent years. The type of fudge has been agreed that has dogged agriculture and failed many who wish to see a viable industry based on innovation and quality."
