Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I recently had a meeting with IFA officials, as I stated previously. A line I used before is that the organisation is very good at keeping the Minister’s feet to the fire in relation to issues. The officials had recently been at a meeting in Brussels and obviously spoke about their fear of cuts to CAP under Pillar 2. They spoke about the whole conversation as regards ReArm Europe, etc. Obviously, the argument needs to be made.

Another point that was made – the officials were very decent in that they provided me with minutes of the meeting – concerns the idea that in the approximately two-year timeframe for the new CAP, the Government needs to make sure every step is taken to ensure simplification of application. It needs to be possible to apply for all schemes at one time. We need to have clear rules and regulations and ensure the system is streamlined. We have dealt with this before. There are a number of issues with farmers constantly having to provide the same information for different schemes, sometimes to the same Department. It has to be possible to streamline all of this while making sure all the necessary negotiations are engaged in with regard to protecting the CAP.

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