Mr. Declan Mullins:

Essentially it is complicated. As other speakers have said earlier, commonages are difficult. The position is that people have been claiming them all along and they were not aware of it being an appurtenance. The situation has evolved. When area aid was introduced, 150,000 applications came in with maps of commonage. Nobody was in a position to drill down deeply into who owned commonage and who did not and why they were claiming it. In a great many situations, one person claiming the commonage would send in a map for all the other shareholders and that is how it got into the system. In the past few years, as part of the EU audits that incorporated commonages, we had to try to create a database and bring our systems more up to date so that we can stand over the information on who is entitled to claim a share of the commonage and who is not. Most of the commonage land in the country is registered in undivided shares that one can rent and they do not have to travel with the parent holding.

Where the commonage is an appurtenance it means that it legally cannot be detached from the greenland or the lowland to which it is an appurtenant. Essentially in simple terms, it is not legal to say in respect of an appurtenance,"I have this grazing right and I will give it to another person for X amount." Historically how it evolved down through the Land Commission was the appurtenance went with a specific piece of land and if one is not farming that land one is not entitled to the grazing right. In the context of trying to return to the way things were done historically and keeping the land well maintained in the way they were farmed years ago, the question of anybody detaching a grazing right in the past such as 150 years ago, would not have happened. As Senator Michael Comiskey said, every year the farmers would meet up and decide how they would graze the commonage. In addition, one can have grazing rights that are appurtenance as things called sums, collops and can be calculated vis-à-vis the total amount of green land one has so they are not like other normally undivided commonage. We cannot be seen to be going against the legal position that is enshrined in land law. In addition, the Commission will be back to us on the issue of commonages. Although the Commission has not gone into the registered ownership, of who is claiming what and if the person is so entitled, it will do so some day. The answer is that it does not appear that one can detach an appurtenance from the green land to which it attaches on a folio. However, perhaps somewhere in a Commission regulation there may be something that contradicts this so that if one is farming the land one is entitled to claim it.