The Irish Farmers Association has threatened to make unannounced farm inspections an election issue, while its president Pádraig Walshe says he will not stand by and see farmers treated as criminals.
One per cent of farmers have to be inspected annually to ensure they are complying with the various environmental, health and other regulations to qualify for their single farm payment which was worth €1.2 billion in total last year.
At the organisation's annual general meeting in Bluebell, Dublin, yesterday, Mr Walshe criticised senior management in the Department of Agriculture for "the shambles" they had created and the heavy-handed tactics used against farmers by a small minority of inspectors.
Ultimately, he said, the Minister for Agriculture and Food Mary Coughlan had to take full political responsibility for what he termed one of the most unsavoury periods in the relationship between farmers and the department.
"The first mistake by the department was their attempt to circumvent IFA and unilaterally impose their will with a totally inadequate information campaign," he said.
"They failed to provide the inspectors' checklist to farmers."
"No wonder there was such resistance by the department when at the end of the inspections, we eventually extracted all 66 pages of the department's handiwork, including 1,450 different sections, requiring inspectors' signatures at 28 different places," he said.
He was prepared to put last autumn's non-co-operation pledge behind him, but there was a clear message from IFA to the Minister that a new inspection regime must be in place and agreed before applications for the 2007 single payments were sent to farmers.
"Otherwise, I promise every Government election candidate will have to explain on the doorstep why farmers are being subjected to 66 pages of bureaucracy. County executives will head up this campaign in each constituency," he said.
In her address to the agm last night, Ms Coughlan said on-farm inspections were "part and parcel" of the new EU single payment system, worth €1.3 billion per annum.
"These substantial payments are conditional on an inspection regime that meets EU requirements," she said.
"In fact, as a result of the introduction of the new system, there has been a reduction from 18,000 inspections per annum in 2004 to just over 8,000 last year."