Ms Gillian Coughlan:

I thank Deputy Scanlon for his question. He may remember that last week I did not get a chance to address it. The president did. We are reinforcing some of the points we made last week, and I am glad to be here to do that. That delineation should be made in Brussels. Cohesion funds should stand alone. CAP funds should stand alone. There is no way, either here in the Oireachtas or anywhere else on this island, that cohesion funding should be competing with CAP funding. CAP funding, as the Deputy says, is essential for family farms, family farm units and our agriculture sector. Similarly, cohesion funding is essential for our regional development. They are separate and they are integral. As President Kata Tütt said here last week, because of the dangers coming down the line as regards tariffs and defence strategy and whatever the case may be, these old policies are now just being lumped together into one big bag: "Let the national governments deal with that while we deal with AI, big tech and defence." That is not good enough.

We need to have cohesion policies stand alone in order that we can leverage the expertise we have in our regional assemblies that have now bedded in and that are working well. Yes, we can improve them, but there is always room for improvement in every structure, in every system, and we have recognised how these things can be done. If we implement some of those suggestions, the wheels will be greased a little more and there will be more of an element of knowledge about the regional assemblies among the citizenry. That is a piece of work which can be done. However, there will be no point in doing it if there is no cohesion funding. There are other funding streams from Europe and there are other benefits from Europe besides money, but the CAP is the CAP, cohesion is cohesion and, in my opinion, never the twain should meet.