Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

In the BEAM scheme, the demands related to membership of a quality assurance scheme, environmental conditionality, and a requirement to reduce nitrogen production by 5%. We discussed this when I was last here. These conditions were established in a Commission regulation. It may be that some potential applicants were not happy to try to meet those demands.

The beef data and genomics programme, BDGP, seeks to improve the genetic quality of our beef herd for two reasons. We want to make the herd more climate efficient, because the more that can be produced from lower inputs, the more climate efficient the herd becomes. We also wanted to improve the quality and economic efficiency of the beef herd. We have approximately 24,000 farmers involved in that and our funding for 2018 was more or less fully subscribed. We expect it to be this year too. This year, we created an addendum to that scheme because the weighing of weanlings at weaning point was missing. That is an important indicator of the quality of calves and was a significant addition to the database that we are trying to create, which will inform policy into the future. We initially provided approximately €20 million for that scheme. Approximately €18.5 million of that has been taken up. It is close to being fully subscribed.