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

It is wrong to say that we are not protecting underground watercourses. Under cross compliance provisions and other EU directives, farmers have serious responsibilities in respect of protecting them and they are very much aware of that. We can only do so much with GLAS. We had to prioritise and we sat down with EPA officials and spoke to representatives of the NGO community and farming organisations. We tried to put together a straightforward scheme that is easy to understand, implement, enforce and so on. There are other environmental challenges that need potentially to be promoted, which are not covered by GLAS. The scheme does not do everything but it does a great deal and, in the same way that REPS and AEOS did not do everything, they had a function.

We are using EPA maps which identify high-status and low-status watercourses. In each case bovines must be present and the parcel must be contiguous with the watercourse. In the case of low status, a further factor is employed to make it a qualifying vulnerable site - that is, the holding must have at least 50% wet soils. We can identify these parcels on our LPIS database and, from an enforcement point of view, that makes sense. While it is not perfect, we are doing a great deal for watercourses.

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