Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Can I get clarification? If I gave two people €70 for greening, surely if the incentive for one is such that he does not engage in the process, it will be the same for the other guy? Why would he bother with greening? My understanding from a parliamentary question I asked is that greening is a bit more complicated for the arable sector, but peculiarly enough, it does not have particularly high single farm payments. I got from the breakdown from the Department. For everybody else, greening is virtually having permanent grass except in designated areas where one might have to comply with all sorts of directions in respect of the designation. Thus, the person with the least incentive to engage in greening is likely to be the person in the designated area because there will be a huge onus on him or her in respect of stocking numbers, rules and a load of things one can lay down that will not apply to anybody else. For everybody else, it is just permanent grass. Is that not correct? Therefore, the biggest cost and downside of greening relates to designated areas where if one does not engage one will not be caught by all these rules. According to figures provided to us by the Department, once one gets to €400 per hectare, productivity does not increase if one measures productivity by livestock units per hectare, so the argument does not hold water.