Mr. Denis Drennan:

The planning scenario is gone beyond a joke. There are serial objectors all over the country who go online, look at what is coming up in each county’s subsection on agriculture and then lodge an objection. Because the objection is deemed to be on an environmental issue, there is no cost or implications, win, lose or draw. What happens is the objector will normally leave it until the last day before asking whether the implication of the proposal has been considered under nature restoration or bird habitat rules or whether it is within 15 km of an SPA or SAC. The farmer then ends up having to spend €4,000 or €5,000 on an appropriate assessment - an environmental impact assessment - for the planning. It takes a couple months for somebody to do that and the whole process is dragged out. The objector could be 200 miles away. It is crazy. Many NGOs have become serial objectors as well, even though a different wing of the same organisation may be saying that farmers have to do the right thing and so forth. We need some sort of a fast-track scenario. Why must farmers who are extending their farmyard or building slurry storage in their farmyard go through the rigours? It is not as if they are putting up something new and turning an industrial zone into a farmyard. We need some sort of fast-track approach so that farmers can get shovels into the ground.

It is the same with ACRES. ACRES has received 50,000 applications. Most intensive farmers are not eligible for ACRES. I tried to get into REAP, which was a pilot scheme the year before ACRES commenced. Most advisers would not take on intensive farmers because there was an interview scoring system in the first tranche of ACRES, under which 30,000 applicants were supposed to be allowed in. There were 46,000 applications and most intensive farmers did not apply because their advisers felt that since it would be scored, they would not get in. There was savage pressure to get plans done. The deadline was extended to allow more time to get applications in. Advisers basically said to anybody engaged in intensive farming that they would not get through the scoring system so there was no point in the adviser wasting time doing up a plan. As it turned out, if a farmer had gone ahead and their adviser had done a plan, they would have been accepted because all 46,000 applications were accepted. However, that is the benefit of hindsight.

The next scheme received 8,000 applications, of which only 4,000 will be accepted. However, what we really need is for ACRES, like the old REPS, to be applicable to all farmers, both intensive and extensive, and for there to be measures applicable specifically for intensive farmers. Farmers are more than willing to engage to protect water quality, as they did in the old REPS. Those need to be practical measures that can be carried out at farm level. We will then see an increase in water quality and greater protection of water quality.