The full address of the 130,000 farmers that received EU direct payments will not be published on the Department of Agriculture website, the Irish Farmers Journal can reveal.

Minister of Agriculture Simon Coveney has instead made the decision to use the new system of 95 municipal districts, which was created under the Local Government Reform Act 2014, as means of identifying where each farmer comes from.

For example, a Carlow farmer will be identified as coming from either Carlow or Muine Bheag – the two municipal districts in Co Carlow.

The number of districts varies from two to eight in the different counties.

The move has been forced as part of the new CAP reforms that commit each member state to publish the name of the farmer and the direct payments they received under the different schemes.

Payments will be broken down into the measures that each farmer received payment under in 2014, eg the Single Farm Payment, AEOS, TAMS, etc.

Farmers who received less than €1,250 in any measure will not be named – an id number will be published instead.

IFA deputy president Tim O’Leary said making these payments known is “unacceptable to farmers and shows clear indifference to their real concerns around the areas of security, confidentiality and data protection”.