Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentation but I have to say farmers are fed up with the guessing game they are playing with the Department. It is causing great grief and uncertainty for farmers, who think they have been told by the Department what the eligible areas are but are now being told it is a totally different game.

How accurate were the exclusions that the Department notified to farmers in 2013? If there has been no change to a farmer's marginal land since 2013, should that farmer accept that the Department has now identified the areas to be excluded? Should the farmer now go by the reference areas on this year's maps? This year's maps have figures like 10%, 20%, 70%, 80%, 50% and so on but they are all changed today. The reference areas have now changed because of the new way of calculating them under the pro ratasystem. Will the Department issue new maps to all the farmers who had exclusions on a percentage basis? The areas the Department originally gave them as the right reference areas are now incorrect. Are all farmers meant to do the recalculation for themselves?

I understood the regulation contained a requirement for a level of minimum farming activity. Has that now been dropped? I cannot find a reference to minimum farming activity anywhere in the submissions and this has been a cause of great contention in Slieve Aughty. Is it now purely a question of the condition of the land? If that was the case it would be a significant change.

What are the penalties for overclaim of land and for not having the minimum farming activity, if that now applies? What part of a land parcel is ineligible? Can one say that 5% or 10% of a total mountain is not eligible or do farmers have to physically redline them on the map?

Is the Department advising that every farmer get a professional planner to actually walk the land, despite the Bing maps and everything else, to make a professional determination and to ensure farmers have indemnity against mistakes? That will take them out of the guessing game and into reality and certainty. Under the rules of GLAS, could I find out that some land is eligible for GLAS payments but not eligible for BPS? Can the witnesses explain the logic of excluding scrub on marginal land and then forcing the likes of Deputy Barry to have ecological focus areas and to take some of the best land in the country and turn it into scrub and be paid for doing that? What is the European logic for that particular scenario? We are all anxious to hear that because I am sure Deputy Barry would love to keep his arable land while the hill farmer would be happy to keep his scrub.

Dr. Smyth said the 2008 SAC areas will continue to benefit from payments. If the Department excluded land under the Bing system in 2013, which brought in the new reference areas, but a farmer believes the land became newly ineligible at that time can the farmer put it back in again now? Do the rules relating to SPAs and SACs apply to NHAs? There are the same restrictions as NHAs but there is no mention of NHAs. If land became ineligible because of NHA restrictions can the farmers put it back in again?

I think burning is going to become a burning issue. What happens if somebody else sets a farmer's hill alight? Two questions arise. One is whether one will lose an entire hill. The other is whether, in the event that it comes back greener than ever, which it has a habit of doing, and green grass grows where there is scrub, it will still be excluded even in cases where the farmer had nothing to do with what happened.

The Department has created another guessing game. Supposing I put in an application for land that is 60% scrub then, under the rule of which we have been notified today, there will be a 60% penalty while the other 40% will be eligible. The Department, however, is saying that Europe might come along later and say that the rule is 50%. Are the witnesses saying the farmer might be penalised by the Department for following the Department's own guidelines because Europe decides later on that the Department got it wrong?

I have a question about bog areas. In the pictures they look nice and brown but what time of year were the pictures taken? An awful lot of those areas are green in mid-summer so are they eligible or not? A lot of places look brown on a map in March or February, particularly where there is millennium grass, but in the summer they are green.