Dairy farmers have been warned by a senior EU Commission official that they will be asked why they should be receiving any EU supports at all now that times are so good for them.
Lars Hoelgaard, the deputy director general in the agricultural division of the EU, also told the Teagasc National Dairy Conference in Kilkenny, Exploiting the Freedom to Milk, that if farmers were unhappy with the income they were getting, they should "get out of dairying".
He told the 800 farmers at the annual conference that it was decided in 2003 to cut intervention prices on dairy products and the assumption at that time was that there would be a reduction in market prices.
"Direct payments were introduced to dairy farmers at 60 per cent of the nominal drop in market price, called the shadow intervention price. That was the justification at the time," he said.
"In the meantime, instead of a drop in market prices, they more or less held their level so even if we go back a year ago, if you take the direct payment and add it to the market price, the amount of money a dairy farmer was getting was higher than at the time before the reform.
"This year it is clearly beyond that with very high prices we have no problem with that but the question what is the justification for a compensation for a price cut which did not happen," he said.
Referring to the recently announced "health check" by the EU on the most recent Cap reforms, Mr Hoelgaard said he expected direct payments to continue to farmers after the expiry of the current plan which runs to 2014.
"I am convinced that direct payments will continue in the period 2014-21 but not at the same levels as at the present time and probably in a more simplified format."
He would not be drawn on the future of the milk quota but said one of the options the EU might look at was not imposing a superlevy on producers who over-produced if the entire EU quota was not exceeded.
This would be beneficial to Ireland because major producers like France and Britain had not filled their allotted quota in recent years.
The farmers were told by Prof Gerry Boyle, director of Teagasc, that they were in an exciting new time which would bring massive changes to the sector.
He said the new optimism was being driven by a welcome increase in market returns for dairy products and the possibility of milk quota increases in the future could create an opportunity for Irish dairy farmers to organically increase their milk production for the first time since 1984, when the milk quota system was introduced.
The conference moves to Castlebar today where more than 500 dairy farmers are expected to attend.