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

The direct answer to the Deputy's last question is "No". We will still be pushing for the adoption of the RDP and the opening of GLAS before the end of the year. That said, there are some things that are outside of my control. The Department had a very quick turnaround time following receipt of the questions from the Commission because we are very anxious to expedite this process and get decisions made and approval granted as quickly as possible. I have made that known to the new European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development whom I met this week. We are still pushing hard to stay on schedule and to get the RDP approved as soon as possible. We think that it is still possible to do it before the end of the year. We want to open up GLAS as well as several other schemes, the targeted agricultural modernisation, TAM, schemes in particular, in January and February of next year. We are anxious to get on with that but obviously the timeline is tight.

On the question of publication, I can publish the observations if I want to. I do not think there is any legal impediment to doing so and I am willing to publish them. However, I am not sure that publishing 266 questions, most of which are very technical or legal, will add anything to the process. Instead, I propose that I appear before the aforementioned committee to go through the different areas on which the Commission has asked questions, to contextualise some of those questions and outline our responses to them. I do not have any fundamental objection to publishing the observations but I do not want to give an impression that there is some fundamental problem here when there is not. It is normal that there would be a lot of questions asked of a document as large and as detailed as our RDP.

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