Mr. Ciaran Staunton:

Let me just go back on that because there is a great miscommunication. No one is saying that a farmer should lose entitlements. I am saying that a young farmer who comes back to Ireland is told: "Don't bother applying unless you have this in place, because this is what we are looking for." On the other hand when we open the newspapers we see there is a sheik in the Middle East in receipt of a payment. How can anyone sit here and justify giving a sheik worth $18 billion some €150,000 a year? He has no green certificate. If we look at the top ten we are not talking about food and drink industries or middle-aged farmers who bought land beside them, worked to reclaim it and became progressive farmers. We are not saying that, but a number of people are getting money who are armchair farmers or armchair millionaires. Last year, many of them got the bones of €150,000. Most of them would not know the difference between an Angus cow and a buck goat.

I do not want to say that our party did this, or the other party did that. Over the past 35 years I have said that, regardless of party, when a person lands in Cricklewood-Broadway or the Bronx, no one gives a hoot what party you campaign for. There is no such thing as political party affiliation when someone looks for a job, a social security number or a couch to stay on. No one gives a hoot, so I do not want people to say "Our party did this" or "Someone else did that". All I am telling the committee is about the facts as they are today on the ground. It is absolutely impossible. What is even worse is that for two years we were blamed and told: "My hands are tied by the EU." After two years of searching we found out that there was no EU regulation. The lack of empathy adds insult to injury. We were misled for two years and were then told that hands were tied. We are getting the moral equivalent of saying: "There's a hole in the wall. We're looking into it."