Dr. Kevin Smyth:

In my time we have had numerous EU audits. I have seen problems with what they see as effective land abandonment and the growth of forage. They have never told me in all that time that we have a problem with the habitats and birds directives. As I said, habitats can be protected under the single payments scheme. One simply puts it down as a habitat and it will be respected as such. The difficulty I have here is that scrub is not biodiversity.