Mr. Bill Callanan:

I am somewhat limited in what I can say. At the moment the process is at a very consultative stage. The Minister has set up a consultative committee which includes other Departments, various stakeholders etc. to inform the development of our strategic plan. At the same time we are holding several public meetings. I cannot pre-empt what will come from them. The best way I can articulate the evolution that is taking place is to refer to the agri-environment schemes of several years ago, such as the rural environment protection scheme, REPS. That scheme pertained to the whole farm but the actions represented a light touch. The next iteration of the rural development programme included the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, which encouraged farmers to take the right actions in a more detailed way. The current iteration of GLAS concerns taking the right actions in the right locations. We are using resources like the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, map of high-status water quality as a selection tool to prioritising entry to the scheme. We then make prescriptions for water quality in those specific areas. All I can say about the process is that CAP expenditure is increasingly targeted and focused. That will naturally evolve in the next round.

Under the most recent iteration of GLAS we have helped to plant more than 1,200 km of new hedges. Some 4,500 farmers have been supported in using low-emission slurry equipment. We have supported 270,000 ha of low-input permanent pasture. This is the type of action that is conducive to the delivery of carbon ambitions. We will have to grow and develop on these gains. About 2,500 farmers have applied for structural funding grants to purchase low-emission equipment. That is also indicative of our support for farmers implementing the actions within the Teagasc marginal abatement cost curve, MACC.

At the same time we have carried out a review of derogation farmers. Those are the more intensive farmers and represent a sector which has grown in size. We went through a public consultation to ask what more they could contribute. One of the measures that has come out of that is earlier use of trailing shoe technology as a mandatory requirement for those farmers. From April 2020 about a third of the slurry in the country will be applied using trailing shoe technology, which is a major advance towards our objectives concerning both ammonia and climate change.