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

I am sorry to be going back to mechanical things all the time, but I want to go back to what Mr. O'Driscoll said about locally led agri-environment schemes and the GLAS interface. If I were a farmer with a lot of designated land and if that was the easy way of getting my €7,000 without having to have low-input pastures and meadows, the walls and God knows what else, measures for hen harriers and so on would be out the window. When the locally led agri-environment scheme comes in, will the farmer be able to look at all the choices he could have made if he had known the locally led agri-environment scheme would be there and what its terms would be? Will he be able to go back and say he wants to change his plan and now wants to put in stone walls, low-input pasture, meadows, bat boxes and God knows what else and make up the €7,000 that way?

Will he be able to take out the measure he was availing of, which was the lazy man's measure of just having a designated SPA, re-jig his plan and then claim the SPA or hen harrier payment under the new scheme? Will people be allowed to do that? It is very important that they be allowed to. It is unfair to farmers that they were meant to have foreseen the rules of a programme that had not yet been published - they were not published at the same time. Therefore, will there be an allowance for the amendment of the plans in order that they can re-jig all the measures in order to avail of both schemes? In that way, they will not be breaking any EU regulation, but they will maximise their cash.

I do not agree with Mr. O'Driscoll about mountain land. I refer particularly to what happened to these farmers with regard to the single farm payment, whereby they were offered €250 but it was all taken back off them, and they were left with a mountain that they could not use for forestry, wind turbines or anything else. In Deputy Deering's country, where there is a great deal of milk and so on, farmers would be laughing at €7,000 being regarded as big money. They would say it was only petty cash compared to a single farm payment of €70,000, €100,000 or €200,000, and €7,000 is only the change they would give to the gasúr.

I am surprised that fisheries was not mentioned in the presentation; it was included in the documentation but not in the presentation.

In regard to the rural development programme, planners are complaining that a new rule was introduced last week whereby 16.5 points have to be achieved under tier 3 to enter GLAS, so they had to revisit all the plans and re-jig all the measures to try to arrive at the 16.5 points. I do not know whether 16.5 is a high or a low target, but apparently it has caused quite some consternation. If that is a condition, why was it not in place at the beginning and how has it become a condition at this late stage? I understand that the closing date is Friday week. I have not yet heard from the Minister about an extension to the closing date, which no doubt will happen in the next week or ten days, but as of now I understand it is Friday week. I think planners have had a bellyful of it. They are under awful pressure from their clients, and I understand that some, including Teagasc, have told 2,000 farmers that they cannot do it on time - and that was before the 16.5 target.