Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

The Chairman is absolutely right. This is one of the most difficult areas across member states. There were many efforts to define active farmer in 2013. In the end, what was produced was a sort of negative list which member states could add to if they wished. That is because it was difficult to produce a definition. The phrase used in the leaked paper was something like farmers who are reliant to a significant extent on farming for their income. What does that mean? At its worst extreme, that could be interpreted as excluding part-time farmers. That would exclude 60% of dry stock farmers in Ireland, so it is clearly not an acceptable definition. I am not suggesting that is what is intended in the leaked document. It is not. I am simply trying to point out the complexity of coming up with a definition. I believe everyone agrees in principle that CAP payments should be directed at farm families. By and large the evidence given in the leaked paper suggests that will be the case. Coming up with a definition of an active farmer is fraught and difficult. If it was easy, we would have done it in 2013, but we did not. We came up with this effort to resolve the issue, which I hesitate to call a fudge. As I said, it was really a negative list and it meant that someone running an airport or a golf course or whatever was not an active farmer.

The other thing is that if the definition is too complicated, we end up with extraordinary administrative complexity. People might say that is a problem for us, but if there is administrative complexity for the Department, it inevitably reflects back on farmers. It makes schemes complicated and there would be various kinds of difficult assessments. I do not have a simple answer for the Chairman but I would say that it is a complicated area and we have been talking about it for a long time.