Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Two sets of negotiations are ongoing. The first concerns negotiations on the overall budget, the multi-annual financial framework, MFF, as referred to by the Deputy. We failed collectively last month as a European Union to get agreement on the MFF. This budget is for seven years and is worth more than €1 trillion. There was a wide variation in what countries wanted in terms of the levels of reduction or increases to that budget. For example, Britain wanted cuts of up to €200 billion. President Van Rompuy proposed cuts of approximately €80 billion. As the negotiations proceeded, the different budget lines within the budget were being debated in terms of which might take cuts and which might not. There are three big budget lines. CAP represents approximately 38 to 40% of the budget. Cohesion Funds represent one third of the budget and innovation and research and development also account for a large chunk of it.

Ireland has been trying to prevent a significant reduction in the overall MFF funding. If there are to be cuts, we will seek to protect the CAP budget within that. Some 85% of all EU money coming into Ireland comes through CAP. This amounts to approximately €1.6 billion per annum. We had some success in the negotiations. At one stage, it looked like there was going to be a cut to CAP of approximately 6% or 7% in terms of pillar 1 and about 11% in pillar 2. By the end of the discussions, this had been reduced to a 3% cut in pillar 1, which was progress. The difference was about €8 billion across the Union.

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