Dr. James Moran:

There are two fundamentally different approaches within ACRES. There is an ACRES general approach, which is similar to what we have had in previous action-based agri-environment schemes, which is a list of prescriptions with some results-based payment in it but it does not have the local supports in it. Then we have what we would call a different co-operation ACRES model. In that there is a local area plan for the eight areas that are drawn up. Within that there are scoring and verification systems for payments for nature, water and climate integrated together, and then there are supporting actions where the score is low to increase the payment. It is quite a sophisticated model, therefore. That model needs an awful lot of capacity to be built and there have been challenges in whether we have the advisory capacity and knowledge to do this. If we were to scale that then we should be dividing the country into somewhere in the region of not just eight areas, but in terms of the diversity of the land base of the country we have somewhere in the region of anything from 50 to 25 different areas where we would require local area plans. These would then co-ordinate the actions in terms of the water framework directive and climate action as they relate to agriculture.

There will be a local support office to co-ordinate this action that would take responsibility and take away a lot of the paperwork for the farmers, and then within that, through the advisory services that facilitate local action on each individual farm, they would capture the complexity but have their own simplified plan and list of payments and supports that would be available on an individual farm-by-farm basis. From a governance perspective, that sounds very complex but we have the capacity to do this in the next three or four years. We have worked in the past 12 months in particular around the IT issues with the Irish Centre for High-End Computing. There is a Terrain-AI centre, funded by SFI, that uses remote sensing and satellite information that can capture an awful lot of information, distil it down into web portals and information systems that can be managed by the centralised team and then give clear messages to the individual farmers on the ground who know they do X, Y and Z on this part and they can earn this amount of income from it or pay for this or mitigate this. The model is there. We are scaling it now to 20,000. I do not think we could have scaled it beyond that this time because of capacity and administrative issues but if we scale that now, make it work on these 20,000, while at the same time have a parallel process of development to develop our IT support infrastructures, co-ordinating and feeding into a coherence policy, by the time the next CAP cycle rolls out in 2027 we will be ready to scale this across the country. However, it requires that level of advanced thinking. The problem with the CAP is that we never plan it until we get our legislative framework from Brussels, which is always very late because the Commission, the Parliament and the Council of Ministers have to agree. We should perhaps plan in advance of that and influencing what the framework should be to facilitate us to do this. We are Europe. We do not need to wait for Europe to make the framework. We ensure the framework facilitates what we need to do to make this nation prosperous and to secure an environment quality for the next generation.

I believe we can do this. I know what I have just said sounds immensely complex, but we are in a crisis. When we respond to crises like we did with Covid, we can respond as one of the best in the world. We must have confidence in our abilities to take these 159 recommendations and apply them across different sectors. In agriculture, we have to do this for the future of our food security and in order that future generations are able to survive on the planet. I believe we can do this, not without challenges, but as the previous speaker said, we have to come away from the rhetoric of conflict that is in this and build trust to work on this together.