Ned O'Keeffe (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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Question 150: To ask the Minister for Agriculture and Food the reason payment of the early retirement scheme has been withdrawn in respect of a person (details supplied) in County Cork. [2298/05]

Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)
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The person named is a participant in the current early retirement scheme, which she entered in joint management with her husband. She appealed against my Department's classification of her application as one of joint management to the agriculture appeals office where her appeal was first upheld but then rejected on review by the director of the office. The significance of this decision for the person named is that as this is a joint management case, any national retirement pension payable either to the person named or to her husband must be deducted from the early retirement pension. If the application had been hers alone, her husband's national retirement pension would not have counted.

In the case of the person named, the Department learned that her husband had become entitled to a retirement pension from the Department of Social and Family Affairs effective from 13 June 2003. The amount of this retirement pension exceeded the value of her early retirement pension. My Department suspended payment of the early retirement pension to her in June 2004, but by then she had been overpaid. As the scheme is co-funded by the EU and governed by EU regulations, my Department is obliged to recover all such overpayments.