Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 24 January 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Special Reports on EU Support for Young Farmers and the Rural Affairs Programme: European Court of Auditors

12:10 pm

Mr. Peter Welch:

The Commission certainly takes account of our recommendations. Sometimes it takes account of our recommendations by saying that it rejects them and it does not want to implement them. We are not always pushing at an open door with our recommendations. In the lead-up to producing the communication that we have at the moment, it spoke to us again. It wanted to run through some of the things we had been recommending and to make sure that it properly understood those recommendations. We have a constructive relationship with the Commission from that point of view. We will also be producing a document of our own, commenting on that communication, over the next couple of months. It will be a briefing paper, not a report, which will look at it in the light of the things that we have been looking at and what we have been saying over the last few years. We will try to maintain that constructive process going forward, which will make it easy for people to take account of the things that we have discovered and said about it.