Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 16 February 2017

Public Accounts Committee

2015 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 7 - EU Refunds and Levies in the Agriculture Sector

9:00 am

Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

It is rather the contrast between the two sides of the picture shown on the screen. The picture happens to be of a semi-urban area but it makes the point anyway. Prior to 2013, we had the imagery shown on the left. If one of the other slides could be shown, it would be clearer. Could the next one be shown, please? This is farmland. One can see the clarity of the image on the right is far greater than the clarity of the image on the left. Key to this was that the Commission felt that the imagery we were working off was inadequate and, as a result, it found that land that the farmer had declared as eligible, and which we had accepted as eligible, was ineligible. In 2013, we acquired new higher-quality imagery, which is shown on the right of the slide. Obviously, this made it much easier to determine what was and was not eligible.