Farmers may get upwards of €25,000 to conserve old farm buildings under the terms of the new Rural Environment Protection Scheme (Reps).
The plan is being drawn up by the Department of Agriculture, the National Reps Conference heard yesterday.
Gerry Rice of the Department of Agriculture told the 300 people who attended the event in Tullamore that €1 million per year was being set aside to run the farm building conservation scheme in conjunction with the National Heritage Council.
He said the scheme would be one of the supplementary measures which would form part of the revised Reps 4 agri-environmental plan and would apply to special farm buildings with vernacular which was important to the landscape.
"The scheme is unlikely to apply to buildings three miles down a boreen and the buildings will be identified by the planners and the scheme will be operated with the National Heritage Council," he said.
Farmers taking part in Reps, which is the major agri-environmental pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy, must adhere to 11 basic requirements when joining the scheme but in the draft scheme for Reps 4 there are 26 supplementary measures to top up their income. Most of these, the conference was told, involved issues of bio-diversity, water quality and climate change.
There was some criticism of the planners, who help farmers draw up the five-year plan for Reps, from Eoin O' Sullivan, Gort Archaeology, who said a study of 160 Reps farms led to the discovery of 64 previously unrecorded features of historical and archaeological interest which should have been included in the plans.