Expectations that Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan will announce that farmers are to be given 14 days' advance notice of all inspections of their farms at the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis next weekend have been dampened by EU Commission sources.
The issue of no-warning inspection of farms is top of the farming community's election agenda and has put the Government under pressure in recent months.
The matter has been complicated by the implementation of the EU Nitrates Directive last year and the land inspection issues that arose from this directive, designed to deliver cleaner groundwater in Ireland.
The Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) president, Pádraig Walshe, claimed at the weekend that there were more than 7,500 on-the-spot inspections of farms last year. More than 30 per cent of farmers were deemed to be in breach of regulations and 1,389 were penalised financially.
Mr Walshe said Ms Coughlan had given a solemn commitment at the IFA's agm in early January to deliver an acceptable inspection regime by the end of March. He said he would hold her to that commitment.
"Ms Coughlan cannot allow department inspectors back snooping on farms in 2007 with a checklist which runs to 66 pages, covering 1,450 different questions, sections and permutations and requires the inspectors' signatures in 28 different places," Mr Walshe said.
However, the issue did not make it onto the agenda of the EU farm ministers' meeting in Brussels yesterday. Commission sources said the matter of inspections to ensure that farmers complied with EU regulations was now in the commission's hands and that it would issue its report on March 28th next.
"You cannot have pre-arranged inspections because the European taxpayer and the European consumer demand value for the money, they pay directly and indirectly to Europe's farmers," said one commission source.
"There has to be a control system to satisfy both farmers and the commission and the difficulty is finding a system which will cover the most sensitive scheme of the Common Agricultural Policy," she said. The commission's report on the inspection system comes from demands from Ireland, Germany and France that there be less bureaucracy in the farming system.