Ireland will have to decide whether it should roll over existing CAP schemes or redesign them to take account of new priorities, according to Department of Agriculture secretary general Brendan Gleeson.

Gleeson was speaking at the Agricultural Consultant Association (ACA) AGM, where advisors stressed the need for clarity on CAP transition regulations.

Regulations to extend the current CAP are currently being finalised, as the next policy will not be ready in time for 2021.

Gleeson said transitional regulations for direct payments would be straight forward, as they were annual schemes that didn’t change.

He also did not envisage a problem extending TAMS, as it involved a single investment.

Options

However, for schemes such as GLAS and BDGP, which run over a number of years, Gleeson said it was likely that there would be a number of options.

One would be to roll them over for an additional year or another would be to design a new equivalent scheme that would run for a period of three years.

“The easiest thing to do would just be to roll over what we have. And that may be necessary, because there may be no other option,” Gleeson said.

“Something we have to have to reflect on, in the context of TAMS or anything else, is what is it do we want to spend public money on in the next period? It may not be the same thing we invested in up to now.”

In the context of Ireland’s emission reduction plans, Gleeson said it had to be considered whether schemes like GLAS needed a bigger focus on climate as well as biodiversity and water quality.

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