Mr. Pat Murphy:

A number of issues have been raised. Deputy Ó Cuív's first question was on the number of Teagasc facilities. Up to a number of years ago Teagasc had a hill farm at Leenane but no longer. Teagasc has changed its approach to working with farmers in this area and has adopted the BETTER farm approach. It has worked extraordinarily well for beef farming. We are putting in place real life research on farms and work with farmers in order to get results. There has also been a series of sheep farms that have adopted the BETTER farm programme, or have been developed over a period of years, and a couple of those are hill farms. That is our approach. The farms are being extensively studied in co-operation with the farmers who operate them. This means that the farmers have a much greater chance of giving us guidance on the best way to work and there is a greater capacity to convey that knowledge to farmers. It is a change in approach and a more effective and efficient use of resources from a Teagasc perspective, but it can be equally effective.

I shall deal with the issue of a co-operative approach versus collective responsibility, which Members view as being a significant issue. The point was made that commonages are managed by groups of farmers in different ways. Therefore, it is hard to put in place a single approach that will work in all cases. The forcing of collective responsibility is likely, in my view, to exacerbate an existing problem.

If we look at the British examples, in terms of where they operate with the co-operative approach in relation to the agri-environment schemes, as it were, the more optional end of the payments that are coming to farmers, they do not interfere to any extent with the single farm payment but are looking at the extra outcomes that exist for farmers to deliver. They are encouraging farmers to work together but it is not a simple job. They have had to take an approach where they have required professional people to get involved with the farmers to encourage them to work together, to show them the potential benefits, and to educate them to try to achieve some of the outcomes. At the moment, if one tried to introduce collective responsibility here, one would end up with a battle and outcomes that do not get close to what one is trying to achieve.

On the notion of agri-environment schemes looking at outcomes rather than inputs, one of the issues with that is it will require greater manpower to work with farmers to look at those outcomes, to look at the current status of those individual commonages, to look at what they can do to achieve a higher status and to work with them to acquire a higher status. That goes beyond a prescriptive approach based on a set of figures written on a piece of paper. In fairness to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, it would like to move to the approach that was outlined to the committee by the Burren people, where they are in a position to examine and assess outcomes. If we are serious about achieving improvements, we must design a scheme that comes out of the combination of commonage frameworks and Common Agricultural Policy reform. We must move in that direction. We must be a lot more flexible in the design of those schemes.

A member suggested that Teagasc and the Department should come together on this, but he forgot to mention the most important group, the farmers. We cannot do it on our own. The committee could invite other groups to attend, and a lot of groups have attended here together but, crucially, farmers need to be involved.