Documents recently released to me by the Agriculture Office of the European Commission prove that the Irish Department of Agriculture were aware since August 2007 that they had illegally misapplied the law in relation to Single Farm Payments to the detriment of elderly farmers as I have outlined in the posts below.
The European Union Court of Auditors found that the Single Farm Payment entitlements of 150,000 hectares of the total 702,000 hectares in the country were unlawfully reassigned away from elderly small farmers.
The annual value of these misappropriated entitlements is estimated to be €220,000,000 and relates to an area of land 8kms wide from Galway to Dublin. The average size of the holdings from which entitlements were misappropriated was 12.84 hectares (approximately 30 acres).
Page 11 of the European Court of Auditors report of the 22nd of December 2006 is a damning indictment of the wrongdoing of the Irish Department of Agriculture. The European Court of Auditors report of the 2nd of August 2007 confirmed their findings and concluded with:
The Court’s services maintain their audit finding that in the cases referred to in the previous paragraph the Irish authorities systematically calculated the SPS payment incorrectly.