Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Martin Heydon has said that all farmers seeking a nitrates derogation will be "treated equally" when it comes to applying the Habitats Directive.

Earlier today, it was confirmed that Ireland will retain the nitrates derogation for a further three years, following a key vote in the EU.

However, the derogation will come with several new conditions, and a requirement for Ireland to apply the Habitats Directive - a EU law separate to the Nitrates Directive, which the derogation comes under - before deciding which areas of the country can avail of a derogation.

Minister Heydon welcomed the extension of the derogation for Ireland, telling Agriland: "This is a fantastic day for Irish agriculture, it’s a huge sigh or relief for derogation farmers and for other farmers who live beside derogation farmers who are worried about land availability into the future.

"We now have certainty, and the unanimous decision of that committee in Brussels today is something we are really happy with, because it wasn’t guaranteed it would be unanimous but it is a really clear sign that the negotiation process we went through, which was lengthy and detailed, has come now to a solution," the minister said.

"We were able to manage to convince [member states] that this is the right outcome for us, because our farming system is different," Minister Heydon added.

However, the minister noted that the new factor of applying the Habitats Directive will be a significant undertaking at an administrative level.

"It does require us to address the Habitats Directive in more detail, that’s something the European Commission flagged with us back in June. We had to agree to addressing the Habitats Directive in more detail to get into the detailed negotiations of the autumn," the minister said.

"So that’s a commitment, after consulting with the farm organisations and industry, that I signed up to in August, and we spent the autumn negotiating with the commission as to what that conditionality would look like, and what that process would look like," he added.

The minister explained that the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine will move to take on ecologists in order to administer the habitats aspect of the new derogation requirements.

He said: "It involves my department having to take on a lot of ecologists and do a lot of work in that space. I want to take that 'in-house' and manage that so we can do that and keep control of it.

Minister Heydon added: "We didn’t obviously hire staff prior to this decision because we weren’t sure if we had a derogation for next year. Now that we do we will set about a recruitment process there and putting a structure in place that allows us to do assessments on a catchments and sub-catchment basis.

"I couldn’t have farmers, where the first catchment was addressed, being treated differently than others. Every farmer will find out about their catchments in that process at the end together," the minister said.

"We have the time here now to address that, as well as the new measures on the Nitrates Action Programme, and we have the certainty to manage out that time in the future and continue our engagement with the European Commission beyond that," Minister Heydon said.