Some planners have drawn up contracts for farmers to join the Rural Environment Protection Scheme without ever visiting the farms involved, a Government Minister said yesterday.
The Minister of State for Agriculture, Mr Noel Davern, told a press conference at the National Ploughing Association Championships that these practices could no longer continue.
Mr Davern said that when some farms were inspected, the inspectors discovered that ditches and hedges that were removed years before were still listed on the plans.
"Some of them must have been drawing up the plans from maps without having gone near the farm at all.
"This is not good enough and it's not fair to the farmer," he said.
Mr Davern said that he wanted to use the occasion of the ploughing championships to warn everyone involved that there would be no watering down of the specifications for the scheme.
More than 30,000 farmers have already joined the EU scheme, which pays £5,000 per year for farming in an environmentally sensitive manner, following a plan drawn up by Teagasc and independent consultants.
Mr Davern said he hoped that more farmers would be able to join the scheme. He would like to see 50,000 farmers taking part in it.
The government, he added, was pressing to have the scheme renewed so it could run for a further 10 years following its ending in 1999.
Farmers, he said, were receiving £100 million this year from the scheme and there was no reason why more of them could not be involved in it.
Mr John Donnelly, the president of the IFA, said that while he was aware that in some cases farm plans had been drawn up without the planners going onto the farm, he did not personally know of such a case. "All I want to ensure is that the farmer is not penalised for whatever happens at the planning stage," he said.