Mr. Phil Hogan:

No better man. The beef genomic scheme is about adding value, not about paying for the baseline. It is also an agri-environment measure and a climate measure. One will not see the type of results and the value of that in one year. It will be over a period. It will be assessed over six or seven years, as part of the rural development programme, to see if it has achieved its objective. In my view it will.

I can understand what the Deputy is saying, that those with under ten suckler cows might not want to get involved in it because they may be worried about the administrative burden and some of the scheme's conditions. It will be interesting to see what the figures reveal county by county.

As for making changes and modifications to include retrospectively the issues mentioned by the Deputy, I do not know the answer to that offhand. I will be glad to check it out, however, to see what can happen in the context of a modification. That is the only thing I can say about it to change from one scheme to another.

As the Deputy knows, the Environment Directorate General has a strong view if it is an agri-environment scheme. It was difficult to get its agreement on the scheme once it was presented by the member state as an agri-environment measure. It was not easy to get this through the system because there had to be a debate on whether it was a production aid or an agri-environment measure. It is a fine line. I appreciate the Deputy's remarks, however, and his concerns about the scheme. I would be glad to investigate that.

The risk-based approach on farm safety is a good idea. We should concentrate resources where the risk is highest and we should analyse the data on that basis. We are prepared to do so. I do not want to go down the road of linking payments to safety, but if member states or farmers do not take this seriously, that is the only tool at my discretion if I want to be serious about dealing with this unfortunate development involving an increasing number of deaths in recent times.

The schemes mentioned by the Deputy are all options under the rural development programme and a matter for the member states. That is part of the discretionary issues given to the member states to decide which options they want, including redistributed payments and animal welfare. People look at this in terms of what they will yield in financial assistance, not in terms of whether they value the scheme. I am sure that is the Deputy's point. As part of the simplification process we will examine these issues to see if there is a neater, less burdensome and less complicated way to provide a source of income for farmers who are just filling out forms on the basis of what they will get in the cheque rather than considering the value of the scheme.

As regards Deputy Deering's point, contraction and consolidation have been happening in every industry, including agriculture, for a long time. That is not going to stop. We are doing our best to tackle input costs, which is where the biggest dividend can be for farmers in terms of better margins. The costs include fertiliser, oil and gas. All these issues are now being discussed in the context of how Europe will be more energy self-sufficient, rather than depending on the Russian market.

We have had our European energy policy for the past few months. For the first time we are going to deal with these issues in a co-ordinated way, but they will not happen overnight.