Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

There is no merit in comparing the scheme in the three Ulster counties in this jurisdiction with the remaining 23 counties. The scheme rolled out by the Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development in the North for its farming community is a scheme where grant aid is only applicable in respect of slurry storage capacity. There was no element to include grant aid for housing, so it is not accurate to compare the schemes because they are not similar. The level of grant aid is not as good in the North either.

My understanding is that the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in Northern Ireland has not received express European Commission clearance for this procedure. I also understand that the Department in the North will consider applications in exceptional circumstances, but it does not have a general extension to the scheme until 2 March. When the Tánaiste, as Minister for Agriculture and Food, obtained State aid approval from the European Commission, the very arguments she made were about adverse weather conditions in early 2006. Unfortunately for all of us, those adverse weather conditions have not improved. In seeking a time derogation, our other argument was that there was not sufficient construction capacity in our economy and that there would be a huge scale of work to be undertaken when we launched a particular scheme. These arguments got us the extension from March 2006 to the end of December 2008. It has been an extremely successful scheme and the most generous granted-aided on-farm investment scheme. The European Commission consistently repeated to us this year that it gave us an exceptional extension to the end of December 2008 and that we were obliged to adhere strictly to that particular condition.

Some months ago, following conversations with individual farmers and representations from colleagues in the Oireachtas, I found out that some farmers, for whatever reason, might not have completed the entire project for which they applied in 2006. I introduced a specific measure to allow an individual applicant carry out part of the work, known as a discrete unit, within the overall plan and finish it according to the Department's specification. The person who would work on an individual project within the overall scheme could draw down grant aid on that particular unit of the project. Many individual farmers applied for substantial projects back in 2006. Subsequently, they might not want to go ahead with the housing element of the scheme. We issued approval to those people to finish specific units within the overall scheme, and that has facilitated many farmers throughout the country in doing the necessary work as they saw fit.

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