RYANAIR chief Michael O'Leary, a longtime critic of "idiot Brussels bureaucrats", received a cheque for almost €60,000 from the European Union last year to help him maintain his Mullingar farm.

O'Leary and his wife Anita are among thousands of Irish farmers whose names were published on the internet last week. The names and home town of every farmer in the country who received payments under the Common Agricultural Policy (Cap) in 2008 have been on the Department of Agriculture website since Thursday.

The 'Squire of Gigginstown' has a prize herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle on his 200-acre farm around his listed Georgian mansion near Mullingar and, according to the website, the O'Learys received €55,821.71 from the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund and European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development.

They were also paid €21,801.35 in the first nine months of 2007 under the EU's Rural Environment Protection Scheme.

A number of TDs were also beneficiaries of payments. Among these were Fine Gael's Seymour Crawford from Cavan/Monaghan who received €26,213.24, Pat Breen from Clare who received €24,890.78, and Paul Connaughton from Galway who got €30,168.71.

Kathleen Carty from Mayo, the wife of Fianna Fáil senator John Carty, received a €6,285.46 payment. Other Fianna Fáil senators, Pat Moylan from Banagher, Co Offaly, and Francie O'Brien from Ballybay, Co Monaghan, got €11,239.46 and €84,866.92 respectively, while Fine Gael senator Paul Bradford from Mallow, Co Cork, received €4,329.

Millionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Niall Mellon of Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, who runs the Niall Mellon Township Trust that has built thousands of homes for disadvantaged people in South Africa, received €17,178.88.

Fine Gael TD Michael Ring has been a vocal critic of the publication of the payments, saying it "simply is not fair on farmers" and will lead to robberies in rural area as anyone can look up the farmers' Cap payments on the internet.

Jack Thurston, co-founder of www.farmsubsidy.org which has been cataloguing Cap payments for the past four years, has refuted Ring's claim. Thurston's website has obtained data relating to 12 million payments in 21 countries worth €66bn.

He said: "The suggestion that transparency will open up farmers to robberies and kidnappings is scaremongering. Farm subsidies have been public in the US since 2002 and it has not sparked a rural crime wave. Nor has it in the handful of European countries that have already opened up their data, including Northern Ireland."