Ms Alice Doyle:

There is one other issue I would like to address. All farmers are now involved in cross-compliance. There is cross-compliance for every scheme in which they are involved. They have to spend money, in most cases, to qualify for those schemes. Money must be spent before they ever get anything back, which puts them in a negative position for a long period. I totally agree with a lot of what Deputy Ó Cuív said. He seems to have a great understanding of the farm assist scheme and I would very much support a lot of what he is saying. Certainly bringing it back to a situation of being able to write off 50% is very important, as is aligning the disregards with Revenue. We have a sample assessment on our website that farmers can do to check if they are eligible to avail of farm assist. When they start the process, they get totally confused because, under Revenue's rules, they can disregard X but, under farm assist, they cannot disregard X but can disregard Y. The complexity puts them off. Farmers are already totally overburdened with bureaucracy and regulation and that puts them off totally. As the Deputy said, they end up deciding it is not worth their while applying because they will have to put in so much time relative to what they will get out of it. Simplicity is the big word here.