Minister of State for EU Affairs Thomas Byrne has insisted that Ireland’s focus remains on finding EU budget consensus among member states before the end of the year to leave enough time to get the 2028-2034 CAP passed, saying that an extension to current CAP is not currently under consideration.

“We are certainly not considering transitional arrangements at the moment,” Minister Byrne told the Irish Farmers Journal in Strasbourg.

“That is something that will have to be thought about if that arose but there is a lot of legislation, particularly around the CAP, that will have to be agreed with the Parliament and member states together and that is why it is important to get it done this year.”

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The CAP is one of over 20 pieces of legislation that cannot be passed until a final agreement on the next EU budget is agreed between MEPs, member states and the European Commission, with Government hopeful it can broker agreement on budget talks at member state level by December.

“At the moment, the focus is on volume, which is a particular challenge in itself in terms of what the contributor member states want to achieve and what the ‘friends of cohesion’ as they call themselves want to achieve so it is a difficult balancing act.”

Detail

Minister Byrne stated that the European Parliament has said it will not get into the “detail” of the next EU budget’s spending programmes before member states finalise their collective position on the key budget “numbers” question.

“But I do think that it is still possible in advance of that to start talking to people about where landing zones will be,” the minister said.

“I do know that in all of the member states there are farmers who do hope that the CAP lives on.”

Romanian MEP Siegfried Muresan, who is leading up Parliament’s side in the budget talks along with Portuguese MEP Carla Tavares, stated that the two “traditional” funding priorities of the budget – CAP and cohesion funding – “continue to be important” for MEPs.

However, the MEP’s reaction to what the Cyprus presidency of the Council of the EU proposed on the next long-term EU budget – an overall 2% budget cut on what the Commission put forward – suggests that he sees member states’ early position on the next EU budget being further away from MEPs’ views than the original hotly opposed proposal had been.

Top-up

The Parliament is looking for a 10% top up to the budget funds and to re-ringfence the entire CAP budget.

It has put forward the imposition of three new taxes on large digital companies, online gambling and cryptocurrency trading in a move it says would raise this extra 10% for the Commission’s coffers and take pressure off member states to pay more into the EU budget’s pot.

Muresan is a keen backer of giving the Commission more “predictable” and “long-term” revenue generating capacity, claiming that requiring national governments’ talks on splitting the EU budget under the current regime end up “divisive, very political, unpredictable and untransparent”.