Dr. James Moran:

I am very familiar with that situation because I have worked on this with Dr. Brendan Dunford and Dr. Sharon Parr for the past 15 years. What has happened is bloody frustrating. In my evidence to the committee in November of last year, I pointed to this situation and the risks inherent in putting a cap on payments and designing an administrative structure around the general ACRES approach that would hamper local flexibility within the locally led co-operation project approach that the Burren was to roll into. This has major potential. It has all the elements in terms of local co-operation project teams, results-based payments, supporting actions and landscape measures. It is the cap on payments, however, and the payment structure itself which basically allow one to go to medium quality and which do not incentivise high quality to the same extent. People such as Dr. Parr and Dr. Dunford, who will stand by their principles and who want there to be no backsliding anywhere in the country, could not stand over the situation at present. There are fixes to this, and the senior officials know that.

Even within our CAP strategic plan, we put an asterisk in one of the tables to allow for adaptation of the payment structure in exceptional circumstances in terms of delivery of environmental quality. The Burren is so far ahead of other areas and many of the areas are high scoring and delivering high quality now. These are delivering exceptional environmental quality and we need to use the flexibility that we highlighted was needed in our own CAP strategic plan.

From an administrative perspective, I have every sympathy for the departmental officials. They are trying to roll this out from 2,000 farmers currently to 20,000 farmers. However, at the moment, there is a problem in the very high achieving areas that they will not get the rewards and incentives required to maintain that high standard. We will move, in many situations, from a low quality to a medium quality. I do not know whether I am explaining it right because it is quite technical. Dr. Brendan Dunford and Dr. Sharon Parr are meeting with the Minister for State, Senator Hackett, and the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy McConalogue, today - probably at the moment. I am hoping a resolution to this will be found.

We must remember that ACRES is, in general, the right approach, particularly the co-operation project. The problem is we have within ACRES an ACRES general and an ACRES co-operation approach. These are two very different approaches that have been called the same name, which is problematic for communications. In addition, the administrative system is designed around the general approach first and tagging on the more ambitious co-operation locally-led approach afterwards, whereas, to be honest, it needed to be done the other way around.

I do not know if that makes sense. It is a complicated issue.