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

The Deputy will see those decisions in the upcoming budget. We have to make choices in terms of where we will spend money next year and we will have an opportunity to debate the agriculture budget in the coming weeks. I agree with the Deputy that a REP scheme or an AEO scheme is very important for family farm incomes, not only in the west but also throughout the country. However, the schemes are not about providing income support. Environmental schemes are about paying farmers to do things they otherwise would not do in protecting the environment or to compensate them for loss of income as a result of doing things to protect the environment. That was what the REPS was about. It was a very popular and generous scheme and I would have liked to have continued it and not gone near the AEOS, but we could not afford to do this. The previous Government made the decision to replace the REPS with the AEOS and we continued that policy. However, the question we now need to ask ourselves, as we redesign a new rural development programme for the next six or seven years, is whether it would make sense to introduce a scheme which would probably only last for a six month period and might not even have payments next year as another version of the AEOS when we know that it would be replaced by a more comprehensive approach towards having an environment scheme from the start of 2015. That is why it is very unlikely we will see a replacement scheme for REPS 4 in the immediate future. Instead, we will look for a more comprehensive response in the rural development programme which, as I said, will start from January 2015.

See this speech in context