Mr. Paul Dillon:

Yes, if one works it out. There are a number of small ones who are coming in and a number of large ones. We do not anticipate that there will be a large fall-off in production.

I might ask some of my colleagues to answer some of the questions as we go through them. On the issue of double funding with REPS, the big change was that under the new CAP when it was negotiated, the direct payments regulation and the rural development regulation were changed to state explicitly that one is not allowed to be funded twice for the same action. This was previously identified by the European Commission as a risk to funds. What one must look at is what income is being forgone by the farmer for a particular scheme and then ask if the same action is involved for two different schemes. If that is deemed to be so, one cannot be paid under both schemes. That was identified as a serious risk to funds and it was explicitly stated that double funding had to be avoided. That is why payments in the organic scheme are made on the basis of income forgone and costs incurred. For GLAS, payments are made on the basis of income forgone and costs incurred. Low-input permanent pasture is an example that is often quoted. The action involved - the income forgone by the farmer in GLAS - is almost identical to the income forgone by the organic farmer. Therefore, one cannot pay organic payment and low-input permanent pasture payment on the same land. That is the logic and one can understand it. It was not an issue in REPS because the regulation was changed since REPS. That is the point there.

I was asked whether the Department funds the organic control bodies. We make a payment of €150 per visit per annum. For each member that is attributed to the particular control body, there is an entitlement to a refund from us of €150 per annual visit. That is the way we fund them and that sum was increased.

I was asked about a manual versus automated system. Our original plan was that we would be able to transfer all of the existing scheme participants into the new scheme and that would all be automated via an online system. However, the Commission told us clearly that it would not allow us to do that. As such, we had to come up with a hybrid system. That is why we are stuck with some of the manual payments.