Mr. Paul Dillon:

On the question of the grass, low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, and why we were leaving it to the farmers to employ an adviser to draw up the plan by themselves, we met the Agricultural Consultants Association, ACA, and Teagasc, separately and jointly, and had a series of consultation meetings with them over a number of months about how we would organise the scheme. We put to them the difficulty of farmers coming together and agreeing on one adviser and one plan. We would all agree there can only be one plan for each commonage because everyone must be working towards a common purpose. We wanted to make it as non-prescriptive as possible in order that the farmers and their advisers would have as much scope as possible as to what measures they would introduce by way of improving the agri-environmental status of the commonage. That is reason we did not want to impose plans on the farmers. We offered to get involved in linking farmers with advisers for the purpose of doing this, but both Teagasc and the ACA said they could look after this themselves.

We also asked them about the timeline and if it was possible to do this, as alluded to by Deputy Kyne, and they said that while the timeline would be tight, they believed it could be done. We are mindful of the fact that all these commonages will all have to be walked and that a good deal of work will need to be done. We may need to revisit the timeline in terms of lodging the plan, but if we are to accept a farmer into GLAS and start making payments to the farmer from the start of a contract date, that means the farmer has entered into agri-environmental commitments. We must have something against which to be able to measure those commitments. We cannot simply take a farmer into the scheme on the basis of signing a commitment to join a plan. We must have something of the detail that is in the plan. The idea was that we would not be prescriptive as to what measures would go in and that the adviser in conjunction with the farmers who wanted to join would be able to agree on the optimum level of stocking that would be appropriate for that particular commonage. They would know the current level among all the shareholders and the optimum level, and then they could take a stepped approach to get from the current level to the optimum level. That was the planning behind it and the reason we were using this model.

At all times our philosophy was that we did not want to impose upon the farmers and the advisers what particular model they should use because it was pointed out to us several times that the people who know what is best for the commonage in terms of how to improve it are the farmers and they could get together with their own advisers in terms of how to improve it. Stocking is one element but there are other collective actions that can be introduced as part of the plan to make it better from an agri-environmental point of view.

The rate payment proposed under GLAS was €120 per hectare per annum. A fair chunk of that payment was arrived at by virtue of the fact the farmer would be paying the adviser to do that. The point has been made about how this will be worked out if several farmers are involved and if it will not be the case that the advisers will go after the easier ones, but there is a flip side to that. If there are a large number of shareholders involved and they and a few planners get together, they will note that the cost they have to charge each farmer will go down the more commonage shareholders there are.