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

No, because different sheep farmers are in different situations. Each sheep farmer will be affected differently by the redistribution model, depending on what his or her single farm payment is. Obviously, the lower the payment, the higher the gain from redistribution between now and 2019. The relatively small number of sheep farmers on high payments will lose something as a result of redistribution. The issue is how we maintain supports for sheep farmers next year and the year after. The decoupled payment approach we are proposing will mean that the value to them of the sheep grassland scheme will be maintained in full immediately. We will look at a fair redistribution model after this, in the same way that we decoupled beef payments in the past, as opposed to treating the two separately. It is not true to say we have a coupled payment for beef. We decided not to go for a coupled beef payment under Pillar 1 because everybody else would have had to pay for it. Instead, we found €53 million under Pillar 2 for a beef genomic scheme that would involve farmers having to perform a certain number of tasks in order to get €80 per calved cow. If we were to do something similar in the case of sheep, we would probably be looking at a very small amount of money per ewe. I do not think many farmers would want the hassle of this.

We are trying to keep this as simple as we can for everybody.

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