Commissioner designate Phil Hogan put in a highly competent display in front of a packed European parliament agriculture committee last week.

His suitability was afterwards confirmed by a vote of the committee and he is scheduled to be ratified by the overall parliament in Strasbourg on the 22nd of October before taking up office officially on November 1st.

He has already committed to meet ICOS in Dublin in the first month of his appointment.

During questioning on the dairy issues he made some interesting comments. Firstly he confirmed that he was fully committed the full abolition of quotas in April 2015.

He was much cagier on the butterfat issue making little or no commitment to alleviate superlevy.

On dairy tools, he said that he would consider all options including the use of export refunds, but he did say that this was an exceptionally expensive option.

He committed to put a lot of energy to develop dairy and general trade to 3rd country markets during his commissionership.

He also said he was reluctant to use the ‘Crisis Reserve’ as he say this a s farmers own money.

Hogan also underlined the need for general CAP simplification and his aim to attract more young people into the agricultural sector, and he promised to leverage additional funds across other Commission departments particularly under Horizon 2020 in order to generate jobs.