Andrew Doyle (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To be helpful, as Deputy Fitzmaurice said, there is a lot of good land about which this issue does not arise. The Deputy is talking about marginal land. It goes back to the point made earlier that the Department will brief all the advisory services and, I presume, its own inspectors. With regard to the applications, 90% of the time they will be submitted with the assistance of a professional planner who will need to take a lead on this and offer guidance. I appreciate that the officials are trying to allow flexibility. I would consider that photograph to be fairly straightforward. More often than not it will arise in a commonage, although not exclusively, and there may be a plan stating that this forms part of the nature of the terrain and it is part and parcel of the eligible area. There may be a proper vegetation management plan, for which the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine officials acknowledged pragmatic protocols with respect to burning should be in place, similar to what is in Scotland where no one can argue about the biodiversity being intact. To take the example of the extreme case of the Burren, a regime was put in place initially which would have damaged the environment because there was not meant to be any livestock grazing during the winter and the early spring when the hazel gets out of control and upsets the entire balance of the ecosystem. It is technically not grazing land for some of the time when it is grazed. It goes back to the mapping and the photograph. It depends on the time of year the photograph is taken, and the fern is probably the best example of that. A common-sense approach is required. The basic point is that the people who will assist farmers in making the application - not all the land will be subject to the 1 million parcels audit under the land parcel identification system - will be very familiar with the guidelines. We could short-circuit many of the concerns people have, and this is a critical year for everyone in terms of setting the base line.

I ask that we would move on. I am conscious that we have not reached the area on the inspections. A question was posed by Deputy Fitzmaurice about rock outcrop. Was rock outcrop always excluded?