Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

To be honest, the Deputy has anticipated my point. What I was going to say is that, in the context of simplification, we now have to consider whether the best way to simplify is just to leave things alone. That would make life much easier for us and for farmers. At least they will be used to the system by the time we get the end of this period.

We will have ironed out whatever difficulties we have with ACRES. The last time around we got approval for our programme at the end of 2023 and we had to get applications in for schemes by May 2024. The entire programme was so completely different. It was utterly different. We had to rewrite every system we had. I will make a defensive point now and say that we still got €1.8 billion out to farmers in that year. There are difficulties with ACRES.