Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

I thank the Deputies. On the 30,000 participants, the experience with previous schemes has been that we have had about that many participants. Under this scheme, had we had more participants than we could afford, we would have had to apply selection criteria and exclude people from the scheme. There will be payments this year. I understand the Minister, when he was before the committee, mentioned €35 million. Payments will roll over into next year. My best assessment of the payments next year is that they will be at least €48 million and maybe a little bit more.

Members have asked me about new farmers. In a way, that is a policy question and I cannot answer it. However, my best assessment for next year is that the €52 million will be fully spent. We also have training components next year that have to be paid from this fund. This engagement with farmers, which will be free of charge to them, is very important.

The Chairman is right that payments under this scheme could run into the next programming period with n+2 - I think it is n+3 now. I can say that it is technically possible to bring people into the scheme up to the middle of 2017 and pay six years, some of which would come from the EU programmes. That is a technical possibility but the decision on whether to do it will depend on the budget available and the Minister, whoever is in place at the time.

On the question of increasing payments, this is a rural development scheme and is not intended to be a direct payment or income support scheme. Rural development schemes are built up on the basis of costs incurred or income forgone. When we came up with these payments, we had to impute very carefully the costs of genotyping, taking samples, going to courses and the various components. We then had to impute an overhead associated with that. It was those individual elements of the payment that justified it to the Commission. That was critical. We could not just arbitrarily increase the payment if more funding was available. We would have to find additional actions to justify an increase, go back to the Commission and negotiate something different. That would be a tall order.

On the question of moving down to three or four stars, we agonised long and hard over it. I will come back to the objective of the scheme. From a domestic point of view there is significant interest in increasing profitability on beef farms. If we are to do that, we want to be ambitious about our aim. Perhaps more important than that, we had to get this through DG Environment and DG Climate Action. We had our environmental experts pore over the scheme and work out the positive carbon impact of moving up to four or five stars. We cannot just arbitrarily move the goalposts now. To do so would require us not only to go back to DG Agriculture and Rural Development but also go back to DG Environment and DG Climate Action as well. I have said this before and want to be careful of what I say. This was a leap for these guys. The beef sector in any country and in Ireland especially has a particular environmental image. Getting to grips with the idea that a subvention to the beef sector could also be an environmental measure was a big leap for DG Environment and particularly for DG Climate Action. We would have to go back and explain we wanted to move the goalposts and make it easier for people to comply. I cannot stress enough how difficult that would be. We would be opening a can of worms which we succeeding in closing a year ago. That is the reality.

I will ask Mr. Macken to address the knowledge transfer issues.