Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

A sum of €1.1 billion is a huge amount of money. The French have a choice. Do they try to pay that out from the Exchequer or recoup some of it from the farmers who overclaimed? If they recoup it, two things are sure to happen. First, there will be pain among the farming community, including small farmers. Second, there is a lower likelihood, although I do not know if it is a much lower likelihood, that the same people will overclaim again. In the Court of Auditors, when we comment on these things, we usually say that if there is a zero penalty for overclaims or zero impact for overclaims on the individual, the incentive problem probably has not been dealt with sufficiently.

On the €8.8 billion for administration, I suppose I am part of that sum and so are my colleagues. It is probably not huge relative to the scale of the effort that is involved in the European Union. Europe spends €145 billion and it is a measure of its power within the European system. The money the European Union has is leveraged. It also has a huge amount of leverage through its legislation and regulation functions, so that means state aid rules, financial supervision rules, working time rules and all those things that are co-ordinated at European level.

It is probably more of a political judgment whether it is worthwhile, and some people have different views. Let us put it this way: €8.8 billion is about 7% of the total spend and the remaining 93% is being passed to beneficiaries. Whether it is sufficiently well managed, we find many problems in the management. If we were to say to the Commission that it has to improve the management of that spending, it would probably say it needs more staff or more administration, not less. Sometimes it would say more bureaucracy, not less. At the moment it is trying to find ways to simplify. It is a balanced judgment. It is exactly the same judgment as members must make here as regards the scale of the Irish administration. The European Union's system is not a UK kind of structure. It is not comprised of 100,000 or 200,000 civil servants. I think it is about 40,000 people.