98% of Irish farm subsidy spending is being kept secret
This follows the European Union Court of Justice ruling in November 2010 that the EU’s disclosure of payment data relating to ‘natural persons’ was a disproportionate violation of the right to personal privacy. In response, the European Commission ordered member states to stop publishing data, and in April 2011 issued an interim regulation requiring them to publish only data on payments to ‘legal persons’ (companies and partnerships).
Previously, payments to all farmers were available on the Department of Agriculture’s website, where the public could search for specific recipients in specific locations.
Now, only 375 ‘legal persons’ receiving about €80 million in 2010 are listed, by location.
According to farmsubsidy.org, the vast majority of CAP recipients have been considered to be ‘natural persons’ by the payment agencies, and only Denmark, Hungary, Sweden and the Czech Republic have provided complete data on farm subsidy spending — and the Czechs have withdrawn some of the data they published.
In the 2010 data released so far, there are 1,330 payments of more than €1m, and the top recipient is the state-owned bank in Romania (€220m). The second highest recipient (€103m) is a state-owned water company in Portugal.
Jack Thurston, a London-based policy analyst and co-founder of farmsubsidy.org, said: “I have been pushing for transparency in farm subsidies for almost a decade. This year, thanks to a very poor ruling from the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, secrecy is back with a vengeance. I hope this is just a temporary setback and that the Commission will bring forward a new, improved transparency rules so EU citizens can know how their money is being spent, who gets what and why.”
