Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)
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11. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if he will confirm the risk of financial corrections being imposed by the European Commission on undergrazing on commonages. [43014/14]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Each year farmers in Ireland benefit from funding of over €1.5 billion under Schemes such as the Single Farm Payment Scheme, the Disadvantaged Areas Scheme, the Agri-Environment Schemes, etc. This comprises the entire net income of many thousands of Irish farmers.The Deputy will be aware that following consultation with the EU Commission, as part of the normal Accounting process, my Department was requested to undertake a complete review of the LPIS database. This on-going review is of major significance as the Commission is seeking to disallow €181m of funding to Ireland relating to payments over the past 5 years this is currently the subject of an Irish appeal to the EU Conciliation Body.

The European Commission has an obligation to ensure that Member States manage and use the EU funding granted to them in accordance with the very restrictive provisions governing the Direct Aid Schemes and general financial provisions. All of the lands declared by farmers must be eligible if these lands benefit from payment under one of more or these Schemes. Under the Terms and Conditions of the Direct Aid Schemes, which includes the Single Payment scheme, farmers are obliged to declare only eligible land when making their applications, and to exclude ineligible features such as roads, buildings, farmyards, dense scrub, etc. Furthermore, farmers are reminded that they should not declare for payment purposes land, which they are no longer farming. It is not sufficient to simply exclude the ineligible features from the declarations submitted as lands, which are no longer being farmed and/or is abandoned should also be excluded.

To ensure the eligibility of lands declared, farmers must maintain lands through normal farming practices such as cropping, cutting hay/silage or grazing by animals with an appropriate stocking rate to control invasive species. In the case of Commonage lands farmers must therefore ensure that lands are kept adequately grazed in order to ensure that the commonage retains the area eligible for payment.

Commonage lands form a significant area of the lands declared annually by some 14,936 farmers in Ireland for the purposes of claiming under the Direct Aid Schemes, with approximately 7%of the lands declared nationally being commonage lands. However, due to reasons such as previous destocking requirements and the age profile of farmers on commonage lands, there is a growing risk of land abandonment on commonages as under-grazing becomes more of a problem. It is therefore the case that the increasing ineligibility of these lands under the Single Payment Scheme and other Direct Payment Schemes poses a significant risk to the State in view of the risk of financial corrections being imposed by the European Commission.

However, from 2015 onwards, a minimum grazing requirement, equivalent to at least one ewe per 1.5 hectares, will be required of all those applicants declaring marginal lands including commonage under the Basic Payment Scheme and the Areas of Natural Constraints Scheme. A lower grazing level will be fixed for marginal lands where it is necessary on environmental grounds. These requirements must be met by each individual claimant by end December 2015 at the latest. The minimum grazing requirement must be met in order to qualify for the Basic Payment Scheme and the Areas of Natural Constraints Scheme under the new CAP.

In 2015, I would strongly urge all farmers to ensure that all of the land that they declare is eligible and is farmed by them. The entitlements established under the Basic Payment Scheme will be based on the eligible hectares declared in 2015. In order to protect their payments in the subsequent years, farmers should exclude all ineligible areas from their declarations. In that case, the newly established entitlements will be supported by land which is eligible for paymentin order to draw down their full payment entitlement in 2015 and subsequent years.This would also reduce the risk of further financial corrections in the future.