The Dealer heard that one of the most influential men in the Department of Agriculture has announced his decision to retire.

Dr Al Grogan, although I’m reliably informed that he is not a man of the Dr prefix, has recently told Department colleagues that he is to retire soon.

Grogan is retiring from the Department and leaves open the position of senior inspector in the Single Farm Payment/Basic Payment Scheme section in the Department. Grogan was in charge of making sure your applications were in order and you weren’t overclaiming or anything like that.

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Former Agriculture Minister Mary Coughlan jokingly once described Grogan as being the “most hated man in Irish agriculture” because of his role.

On a serious note, Grogan more recently played a pivotal role in reducing Ireland’s land eligibility fine from €181m to almost one third of that. The mandarins in Europe thought Irish farmers were claiming for land they should not have been.

Grogan, an Offaly native, has been in the Department since the early 1970s and has a PhD in animal genetics from Trinity College Dublin.