Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 28 April 2015

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Basic Payment Scheme and GLAS: Discussion (Resumed)

2:00 pm

Mr. Thomas Harty:

I have already discussed and explained that we are not saying that our reference areas are explicitly correct. I refer to a point mentioned by the Deputy. Is the farmer explicitly required to red-line out these issues and provide the map or is he just required to adjust his claim? The farmer's obligation is merely to ensure that he is claiming the eligible area; he does not have to explicitly map them for us. We would always encourage people to map simply because when they map they often realise that maybe the ineligible feature is larger than they may have thought. The ultimate obligation is for a farmer to ensure that he is declaring only land that is eligible for payment. Putting a reference area on a parcel, as the Deputy said, is carried out in the office using Bing imagery. Dr. Al Grogan has already referenced that it is an office-based assessment.

I refer to one practical example where it turns out that we are wrong and have not taken out enough. This may occur where we look at something from above, assess there is a grazable area within scrub but when we walk the land we see that it is fenced off. The reference areas cannot give that ultimate clearance to say that we can guarantee it is right but within the issues of stability thresholds and the 10% we hope to remove the fact that a farmer would have got stuck by attempting as best he can to identify these features. There is more flexibility in the system but not a guarantee that what we see is the ultimate eligible area because it can change both positively and negatively.