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

It is a very fair question. We are in the process of finalising Pillars 1 and 2 at present. The more complex element is Pillar 2 with regard to rural development funding, which is approximately €4 billion, 46% of which comes from the Exchequer. We hope to have it finalised so we can send a package for approval by the Commission for Pillars 1 and 2 by the end of June. I believe the deadline required by the Commission is the end of July but I am open to be corrected on this. We would like to get in a bit before this and we should be in a position to do so. The Commission will then go through the procedure of assessing what is quite a complex rural development programme from our perspective. We are already discussing some aspects of the rural development programme with the Commission to ensure the rules allow us to do what we want to do. I suspect its assessment of our rural development programme will take a number of months and this will impact on when we can open big schemes such as GLAS following this approval. I hope it will be by the end of the year so we can get information out to farmers as soon as possible.

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