Maureen O'Sullivan (Dublin Central, Independent)
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Question 265: To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food further to Parliamentary Question No. 1667 of 29 September 2010, if he will complete his reply [38176/10]

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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The exercise referred to by the Deputy in the earlier Parliamentary Question related to the operation of the Single Payment Scheme and Disadvantaged Areas Scheme in Ireland. In particular, the exercise related to the exclusion from land parcels of ineligible features, which were not eligible to benefit from payment under one or both of these Schemes. The ineligible features were identified by examination of 2004 ortho-photo imagery of the land parcels claimed by farmers. In certain cases where farmers were claiming the area covered by the ineligible features, over-payments were established for the years that these ineligible areas were included in these claims.

I can confirm that €5.75m was clawed back and that the vast majority of the areas excluded by my Department for this period related to a myriad of ineligible physical areas such as house sites, farmyards, forestry, roadways, quarries etc. It should also be noted there is no detailed breakdown of the amounts deducted and areas excluded as a result of the exercise. There are a number of reasons for this. In the first instance, it is not necessary to classify the type of ineligible features under the provisions of the governing EU Regulations; they must simply be excluded. Furthermore, the procedure was an extremely complex one involving thousands of individual feature exclusions and that the reduced area had to be applied to each application by the farmers in question in respect of each of the scheme years from 2005.

As the area of land declared each year can vary and the number of payment entitlements (for the purposes of the Single Payment Scheme) held by applicants can also be different from year to year, the final outcome at the level of the individual farmer could vary from year to year. In some years, the over-claim could have led to an over-payment, while in other years it had no impact on the payment. It is also important to note that the vast majority of the over-claims identified during this process did not lead to any over-payment (90% approximately of the cases) as the applicants, while not pointing out the ineligible feature in a map, were making sufficient deductions from the claimed area in their application for the feature and this had no negative financial consequence.