Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In most cases it is not. Through consultation and agreement with farm organisations we have had linear cuts. I acknowledge the challenge to deliver more supports and redistribution as part of that. If we were to provide a €200 suckler cow payment out of Pillar 1, it would be a very substantial cut across the board and in the context of Mercosur would risk driving numbers through a coupled payment. I am not knocking the principle that we need to look at how we support the beef sector and how we support the suckler cow sector but we need to ensure there is joined-up thinking. This has been the position of previous incumbents in my office of all political persuasions who maintained that coupled payments were not appropriate, and that we should decouple and allow farmers to play the marketplace as effectively as possible in an attempt to guarantee incomes and allow them the freedom within certain parameters of minimum stocking densities etc. to respond to what the market is telling them. Certainly at a time when one of the biggest challenges we have in terms of climate change is numbers, we need to be careful we have a joined-up approach. At the moment we are putting considerable funds into beef in terms of the beef data and genomics programme. We need to look at how we can do more in a way that is compatible with other policies we have been pursuing.

On Brexit, there will be no resiling from the position that was negotiated in December. That is the clearly stated position of the Government. The letter the British Prime Minister sent to President Juncker clearly commits her to the legal text reflecting that position. I appreciate that everybody is looking for an angle but that is a position from which there is no resiling. It is recognised in the UK that that is the backstop or else they come up with a better response to it. Of course, a more comprehensive approach that fits the EU and UK as a whole would be fine by us but we will not resile from the commitment on the all-island approach.