Common Agricultural Policy
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-29
============================================================

Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South

I share the Deputy's concerns about simplification. Historically, we have seen complication. You see this with measures coming forward from Brussels, particularly from directorates general other than DG AGRI. We have the carbon border adjustment mechanism, CBAM, and we had the EU deforestation regulation. Those proposals came from a good place but their practical impact on farming and so on had not been fully considered. We then had to unpick some of those measures. We discussed CBAM for a considerable length of time on Monday.
The Presidency of the EU in the second half of his year, when I will chair the AGRIFISH Council, which comprises me and the 26 other ministers for agriculture, gives us a huge opportunity to shape discussions. I am on record as having stated clearly before that I really do want to deliver simplification. If our budget is going to be constrained, or even if we get it up to 100%, the purchasing power of those funds in 2028 and 2029 will be very different from what it was in 2021. That is a challenge for us. Ultimately, simplification means fewer schemes. It means the greatest amount of money possible is directed at farmers and that it is not tied up in bureaucratic schemes. The Deputy mentioned ACRES. I am very proud of the work my Department and I did to address those issues.
It is operating like a perfectly normal scheme now, with more than 96% of farmers paid. On the record of the House, just to clarify, almost €750 million has been paid to farmers since 2023 through this environmental scheme. This is a serious success in supporting our farmers in the work they do.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-29