Mr. Joe Hamill:

I acknowledge the Deputy has been very involved in the bogs issue, with which he and I are familiar. Some of the areas have shown the way forward, where communities have come together with the right type of leadership and have found a way of relocating. We hold them up as a model to other areas. The Deputy is absolutely correct on the wider issue. In recent years a number of National Parks and Wildlife Service plans have developed in various ways in response to various situations, often where there has been a threat of legal action from the EU because we are not dealing with a particular species, such as the hen harrier. In such a case, the Department has no option but to comply with the requirements of the habitat or birds directives. It must designate areas with consequent difficulties for people farming in them.

The hen harrier is a good example, where over a period the Department put in place an incentive scheme for farmers willing to work in a particular way to encourage the hen harrier rather than deter it. The Department paid over moneys. This became too expensive and at a certain point the Department had to close the scheme. We are now running it down. In overall terms we spent approximately €13 million on the scheme. It was very expensive. As the Deputy probably knows, we have had other schemes with varying degrees of success, a recent successful scheme being the corncrake scheme. We have also had schemes for waders and geese, in Wexford in particular. We have a range of such plans. At present our position is that most of them are coming to an end.

The view from Europe is very much along the lines that the Natura framework exists in all of the member states and as such they have legal obligations. There is a co-funding mechanism with Europe to find ways to compensate farmers or help them do certain things in different places. Much of our discussion in the recent past has been with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine on the rural development plan, in particular the GLAS and GLAS plus programmes, under which farmers in designated areas will be required to farm in an environmentally-friendly way - there is other terminology to describe it - and they will be compensated appropriately through the programme. From our perspective we see our future interventions more as asking people to do a particular thing which has a cost. A good example is the Wexford Slobs, where farmers were asked to plant fields and not cut them so the geese could come and eat the crop. We see more measures being part of a broader co-financed package rather than falling 100% on the Exchequer. This is the broad situation as I see it.