Details of payments made to Irish farmers under the EU Common Agriculture Policy are made available on the website of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The link is here but the search feature is not very user friendly. The top 100 recipients have been extracted from the database and can be seen here.
There were 137,748 payments under CAP in 2009 to Irish recipients. The average payout was €14,020. The total payout was €1,931,253,085 (€1.93bn). I don’t really know much about the scheme and it’s overall effect. Natural curiosity brought me to examiner the figures from my home parish.
Here I saw that there were 150 recipients in the parish who received an average payout of €12,142, slightly below the national average. The total monies received by residents of the parish under the scheme was €1,821,339. It’s like the parish wins a lotto jackpot every year – guaranteed!
The highest payment was for €53,541 and the average of the top ten was €35,925. The lowest payment was €172 and the average of the bottom ten was €670. The median payment was €11,164. Details of the payments can be seen here.
The parish is Cappamore in Co. Limerick. According the associated Wikipedia page the population in 2006 was 1407 (669 in the village of Cappamore and 738 in the environs). This means the parish received €1,294 on a per capita basis if the total population is included (and is unchanged since 2006). The equivalent national figure is an average payout of around €430 per capita, around three times smaller.
The 2006 Census gives data on occupations. The lowest-level geographic area available from the Census are District Electoral Divisions. The Limerick DED of 057 Cappamore had a 2006 population of 1,400. This is not the same as the parish of Cappamore and includes parts of other parishes. Parts of the parish of Cappamore are not in the DED of Cappamore and are in the DEDs of 132 Bilboa and 062 Doon West. Although not analogous we can view the figures from the Cappamore DED as being generally representative of the area.
According to the 2006 Census data there were 26 males and 5 females with recorded occupations of ‘Farming, Fishing and Forestry Managers’ in the Cappamore DED. There were also three males and one female recorded as ‘Other Agricultural Workers’. This would suggest there is a maximum of 35 people employed as farmers in the Cappamore DED. The parish of Cappamore had 150 recipients (131 males and 19 females) under the CAP scheme. I am sure the difference can be accounted for by a number of factors but I cannot be certain which.
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