Dr. Al Grogan:

I will respond to Deputy Fitzmaurice as this issue has arisen a few times. I return again to the evaluation we had to consider when we made the change. The document makes few references to the issue the Deputy raises in respect of farming activity. We have moved away from stipulating that a farmer must have a certain number of animals, whether ten, 20 or 1,000. We want to achieve the objective that the land is such that we can be satisfied that, under an audit, it will meet the requirement of having been maintained in a suitable condition. This wording is staring us in the face.

We provided an evaluation. Since we are moving in that direction, let us recall the change that was made. Until December last year, farmers were required under the good agricultural and environmental condition, GAEC, to maintain a minimum stocking rate. I did not highlight this earlier but the GAEC is now separate from eligibility. When discussing the GLAS we discussed the possibility of including a minimum stocking rate and moving forward from that in terms of the commonage management plan. This idea was set aside on receipt of clarification from Brussels. The Deputy will recall, however, that it was never a minimum requirement and we provided that farmers could stock. As an aside, we are deliberately not mentioning chemicals in view of the risk to water as being highlighted in areas. That is a good point which is not in the document. We purposely decided not to treat it as a management tool.

To return to the analysis of trying to come to a conclusion on the point the Deputy raises, I highlighted in my presentation an area where heather is becoming a little taller. What could we or would we do if we were to visit a farm and find a problem? The farmer could ask us where we measured the height of heather. We will have viewed the heather and may even have measured it using a tape measure. What would 30 cm, 60 cm or 1 m in height look like? Our Northern colleagues opted for a height of 50 cm. This is a relatively low threshold as it would not reach too far up the leg of my taller colleague. If we had to take the 50 cm route that our colleagues in Northern Ireland took, the field shown in the picture would have been excluded long ago. As with many things, one must be careful what one looks for. We did not specify a height, which would be difficult in any case, because we believe it is in the interest of farmers to leave a little discretion. While one could argue this is vague or a case of eyeballing, providing for a little discretion would allow for flexibility in the case we are discussing.

What would I have to do under the proposed model? The Deputy argues that I would have to measure the height. We concluded that in the case of an audit we would have to pre-select the location to measure the height. How would one approach this issue on a random site? Would I allow the inspector on the audit to walk around the area in question? Would the Deputy be happy if he were to do so or would he argue with us about where he should walk?

We would start to sample before going out. It would take a long time to walk across 500 ha of commonage. In that context, we concluded that the best approach was to describe the area in terms of accessibility and whether animals are keeping it. Deputies should recall the wording used is "maintaining the land in a suitable condition". As all speakers highlighted, we do not want to pay on land on which nothing is happening. For this reason, something must be done on the land to maintain it in a state suitable for grazing or cultivation. That is the philosophy behind our efforts to develop the system. We want to make life easier for farmers, controllers and myself when I try to explain to the controllers the path we must weave through the auditor, on the one hand, and the political world we inhabit, on the other. We must also be fair to the citizens of Europe by ensuring money is disbursed in the way they intended. That is the reasonable and rational reason we would not prescribe a height. If I specified a height threshold of 1 m, my auditor friend would describe it as an Irish solution to an Irish problem and I do not believe I would get anywhere with it. If I prescribed a height of 50 cm, this scheme would be thrown out and half the heather in the country would vanish. I rest my case, if I have made one.