A SENIOR civil servant told a conference yesterday that he was concerned about the outcome of an audit by the EU Court of Auditors and the European Commission into the operation of the rural environment protection scheme (Reps) on Irish farms.
Michael O'Donovan, principal officer at the Department of Agriculture, told the Teagasc national Reps conference in Tullamore that the court had been very critical of agri-environmental measures generally in its 2006 report.
He said the court questioned the value for money and how to quantify the outcomes from the scheme where farmers contract to farm in an environmentally-sensitive manner for a five-year period, working to an agreed plan.
He said that Ireland was replying to a follow-up EU audit from February last that Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith had told the delegates was "very searching" and which contained demands for tighter and more robust outcomes.
Mr O'Donovan said the commission and the court had to be given assurances about measuring and verifying outcomes and this was difficult to do because these were "soft" and hard to quantify.
"We will have our response to them tomorrow week, but I have to say we are concerned about the outcome of this audit because they were not happy with the way things were being done," he said.
"This is a serious situation, much more difficult than anything we have had in the first 10 years of the scheme," Mr O'Donovan said, adding that this had delayed the negotiation of the new Reps programme, due to start in 2009.
Mr O'Donovan said the commission was beginning to question the 11 basic elements of the Irish Reps scheme and was asking why farmers should be paid for measures that do not apply to all farms.
The commission's attitude, he added, was if "it cannot be measured it should not be paid for".
For the latest round of the Reps scheme, he said, Ireland had to justify payment in more detail than before and now must quantify, verify, monitor and evaluate the scheme. In future, the scheme would have to have an administrative check before any money could be paid over, he added.
Mr Smith, who officially opened the conference, defended the scheme, saying that it had delivered much to the community as a whole in terms of water quality, biodiversity and landscape.