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

Under the rural development regulations, the protection of water quality is one of the priorities to be addressed in the agri-environment programmes of all member states. GLAS is Ireland's new and innovative agri-environment scheme. Two GLAS actions are specifically designed to address the risk of what is known as point pollution in rivers, that is, pollution directly related to bovine access. These actions are protection of water courses and riparian margins. To achieve the maximum environmental benefits from these measures, my Department, in consultation with the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and using data supplied by the agency, has identified certain reaches of rivers throughout the country categorised as high status water and vulnerable status water. Farmers with these areas will receive tier 1 or tier 2 priority, respectively, in the approval process.

In both cases, the identification of the areas concerned was completed using an EPA data set. Spatial queries were run against the data set to identify the land parcels held on my Department's land parcel identification system, LPIS. The criteria used by my Department were that the land in question had to be declared by the applicant as "forage" on the 2014 single payment application, it had to be within a 15 m buffer of the water course identified in the EPA data set, and the applicant had to have bovines in either 2013 or 2014. For vulnerable water areas, the holding had to be identified as comprising at least 50% wet soils. The classification of all holdings in this fashion is stored on my Department's new, online GLAS system and is currently being used by farmers and their advisers to identify the actions required, as well as the tier position they hold.

The Deputy was in contact with some of the technical staff in my Department on this issue during the past week and they briefed me on that.

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