Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I take on board the point and can only imagine how stressful it is to deal with individual farmers who missed out on this. On the Deputy's request for a review, I reassure him that we constantly review the system and how we do it. However, we have to work within the constraints of EU regulations as well. The ANC tick-box screen was displayed before the farmer could select the "no change" option. If the farmer did not tick the box to apply for ANC and then selected "no change", the ANC pop-up warning would have appeared for the farmer. I understand that is cold comfort to the farmers the Deputy represents.

The challenge we have is that experience at EU audit level has shown that Ireland's classification of mistakes as obvious administrative errors can only apply after an application is made by the farmer. The auditors decided that, if no application was made, as in the box was not ticked, obvious error cannot be invoked. In the instance where an application has not been made, this must be treated as a late application rather than an obvious error in an existing application. That is the challenge we have. We cannot deal with it under a mistake because the application never actually happened because that box was not ticked. I will give more detail in my further supplementary reply about what the Department has done to work proactively with farmers.

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