Ireland is in trouble with the European Union over its bees and the EU is to seek recovery of €20,000 paid out to a number of beekeepers in 1998.
A large number of beehives and millions of honey bees were systematically wiped out in a Government slaughter policy when the parasite disease varroasis was first discovered in Ireland that year.
The Department of Agriculture and Food adopted a slaughter-out policy to rid the country of the disease, which has caused severe damage to honey-producing stocks across the globe for the past decade and a half. However, the Government's decision to compensate the beekeepers, who were mainly in Sligo, Leitrim and Mayo, with EU money failed the EU auditor's test.
Last Friday, the Commission said the State would have to repay money used to control the disease. It decided the bee money was "misspent" under the heading "beekeeping, non-eligible expenditure".
However, Irish officials will be quite happy that Ireland is bottom of the Euro list in terms of what has to be recovered.
Austria, home of EU Commissioner, Dr Franz Fischler, is next lowest on the list with a misspent €600,000 on shortcomings "in the management recoveries of agri-environmental payments".
Italy tops the league, with €75.97 million to be recovered for shortcomings in secondary controls in the arable crops sector. Next is Greece, which faces a bill of €57.29 million for "unsound management and lack of key controls in the arable crops sector". France also faces a considerable bill of €23.15 million for "failure to comply with legislation in the win sector".
Since 1995, when the EU changed its recovery system, Ireland has had to pay back only €1.5 million. However, since 1991, Ireland has paid back a total of €135 million, according to EU figures, mainly due to irregularities in the beef processing industry and the operation of the EU beef intervention scheme in the late 1980s and early 1990s.