Results 3,301-3,320 of 34,585 for speaker:Seán Fleming

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: I ask Mr. Gleeson to come back to us with what he has.

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: The more information the public has, the better its understanding of the industry. That is all I would say. I also suspect that in the context of the €9.7 billion that comes into Ireland in foodstuffs, the primary producers in some of the exporting countries got very little of final price that we paid for their produce. It cuts both ways but this committee has to look out for Irish...

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: No, these are payments. There is a note on the next page about commitments but these are payments, I presume. Apologies, they are commitments.

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Right. Has the funding that the Department is actually providing to the sector increased or decreased?

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: He can send the information on to us. I do not need it now. I am not here just to extract figures on the hoof, if Mr. Gleeson will pardon the agricultural expression. He can send that on to us. I wish to go back to forestry now. I ask Mr. Gleeson to give a breakdown, in whatever range he can, for forestry. He referred to approximately 50:50, public to private. Obviously we know that...

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: I ask the Department to provide a breakdown of the forestry grants paid to each of the public bodies involved and a breakdown of the payments to the other landholders who have forestry, by range, in terms of under €5,000, between €5,000 and €10,000 and so on. That is the type of information people seek by way of parliamentary questions and-----

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: We also want to know what were the largest payments. We are interested in what would be some of the highest payments, typically, in forestry. Is there a cap on the number of hectares that can be afforested in the private sector?

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: So they do not get anything.

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Their forestry must be totally commercial. Is that correct?

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: How does that get around state aid rules? Is there a grant from the Department?

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Let us take Coillte.

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Therefore, its forests are strictly commercial.

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: It is strictly commercial and does not get any subsidy. Therefore, the forestry payments are all for private planters. I ask for a breakdown of those figures. I just presumed that every entity in the forestry scheme was getting a payment but Mr. Hayes is saying that Coillte and the other public bodies are excluded.

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: One learns something new every day. There is one final topic I want to deal with, about which we received some additional information by way of a letter from Mr. Gleeson. I want to follow up on the dog business in much more detail. I am not referring to the greyhound industry. We had representatives from Bord na gCon before us who spoke about how many greyhounds had entered the...

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Is there an answer?

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: My question is on a broader issue than that of the racing greyhounds; it is about the canine industry. It is possible that the animals we saw on that television programme were formerly involved in the greyhound racing industry, although they may not have been. I do not know. I am not sure. The point I am making is that many things are happening in the canine industry that are not...

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Which bodies are they?

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Mr. Gleeson will send that to us.

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Who pays for that? The person-----

Public Accounts Committee: 2018 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Chapter 10 - Forestry Grants (24 Oct 2019)

Seán Fleming: Mr. Gleeson probably does not have an idea of the number of dogs that are not microchipped. He will understand that this is about-----