Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

I hope I get this right but I will confirm it. I think that was an entitlements audit. We had a young farmer scheme that involved the payment of additional payments that were a top-up to the basic payment for young farmers. That is funded by a cut in everybody else's payment in the national reserve. When we were managing that fund, we applied an upper limit to the number of hectares - I think it was 90 ha - that we would cover in this payment. We thought that was a sensible thing to do. We were doing a linear cut on everybody else and providing this bonus for young farmers, but we wanted to distribute it on a rational basis so we applied an upper limit. I will come back to the Deputy on this, but I think in that particular instance the Commission stated we had no legal basis for applying that upper limit. That was the basis for that particular disallowance.

We spend €1.3 billion a year overall. I would say there is a disallowance every year. I am not in any way complacent about that but we-----