Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Deputy McGrath's points are very interesting. In Ireland, we might do eight inspections in a year. Those auditors who might be turning up on a funeral day for an inspection - they are not us, just to be clear. We do often say to the European Commission that it needs to get the rate of errors down and be tighter around controls sometimes. At the same time, we are calling for simpler schemes so that it is harder to make accidental mistakes and so that people do not need to do a third year of agricultural college just to understand the scheme. People should be able to engage better with the schemes, so that they do not claim simply because it is too much trouble. All of these things undermine the potential for a scheme to deliver what it is supposed to.

On the young farmers, we do not, as a court of auditors, object to money going to young farmers. That is a policy choice of the European Union. It is a democratic decision and we would never challenge it. What we are saying is that money to support young farmers should be delivered in a way that actually supports them. At the moment, it might not make any difference to a decision, for example if a young person is trying to decide whether to become a farmer or a family is trying to decide how to distribute a farm. This payment should make a difference. It should not be something that one will get either way. It should not be something people will just find a way around. It should make a difference to behaviour if it is to be effective as an incentive. We did not find that it was an effective incentive. Perhaps it is too widely spread or not targeted enough. It was not actually changing the behaviour of individuals very much.

In Ireland, we deal with the kind of farm structures that are here. In some of the other countries where we do audits, the average farm size might be 3 ha or 4 ha, not even 10 h, 15 h or 20 ha. Each country has a different set of problems and the European-level schemes will always be at a loss to cope with national-level problems. There needs to be a good, effective policy-making step at the national level as well, when individual agriculture Ministries are deciding how to apply the flexibility they have been given at the European level. Every country is really quite different and therefore needs to have and use a level of flexibility.

I will let Mr. Wojciechowski speak because he is much more expert than I.