Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael)
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To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the way changes to the common agricultural policy will affect the entitlements of a person (details supplied) in County Wexford [16310/13]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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The negotiations on reforms to the CAP are still underway and it is impossible to predict with any certainty what the final outcome will be. Thus, I would counsel against drawing conclusions regarding the final outcome at this point in respect of any aspect of the negotiations.

In so far as the value of entitlements is concerned, the Commission has proposed that all Member States move to a national or regional flat-rate payment system by 2019. I believe that this would involve an unsustainably large transfer of payments between Irish farmers and have argued for an alternative, more measured, approach that acknowledges the need to move from historic references while not going as far or as fast as envisaged by the Commission.

In order to avoid the very significant transfers of payments that would result from the Commission’s proposals, I proposed an alternative, partial, convergence model based on the principle that Member States should have the flexibility to move away from historically-based systems in a more measured way that respected their individual farming conditions. I am very pleased that the Council last month endorsed this principle and agreed to include the Irish model in the options available for the distribution of direct payments. This enhances the prospect of a more reasonable level of transfers of payments between farmers than would be the case under the Commission’s flat-rate proposal.

Of course, this issue still has to be negotiated further, and the reality is that the final outcome will be somewhere between the Commission proposal and the Irish proposal.