Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The reality is that this was an issue that caused a lot of stress for people so there will be a huge amount of relief that the matter has now been cleared up and that farmers are not going to be asked to make the contribution.

In terms of beef genomics, I share the same position as one of the Deputies. It is always dangerous to say that people have been vindicated. However, the beef genomics scheme seems to be very popular and quite successful. If it needs to be amended then we will do so but I think the scheme is working.

A number of members asked about TAMS approvals. As many as 1,000 dairy farmers applied for TAMS II. We simply cannot give all of those approvals out before the end of the year as there are many things happening in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in terms of huge volumes of money being paid to farmers across multiple schemes ranging from basic payments, areas of natural constraint, ANCs, GLAS, AEOS, TAMS, beef genomics, island payments and so on. We simply do not have the number of staff required to go on to farms and grant approval to 1,000 applicants. We have got people to ring up the 1,000 farmers to find out which ones desperately need to get dairy facilities in place early. For example, there are young farmers who are breeding heifers for milking who do not have any milking facilities. They are new entrants so through TAMS they have to get their milking facilities in place quickly before calves are born and they will be prioritised.

We hope to be able to obtain approval for about 200 of the 1,000 before the end of the year and, obviously, the rest will be approved in January. When I say to farmers that we have to prioritise, most of them accept it. We will try to be as practical as we can in order to prioritise the cases that need to be prioritised the earliest.

We are doing a lot about the hen harrier. Essentially, we have designed an element of the GLAS plus scheme to facilitate hen harrier farming. The commitment made to farmers who have land designated by the previous Government which let everybody down was that they would be paid €370 per hectare. About €2 million or €3 million was set aside for about 4,000 farmers with designated lands. It was disastrous and farmers felt they had been treated terribly and in a dishonest way in an effort to have the designation of land agreed to. We have now responded to solve that problem which was not of the Department's making, whereby a significant proportion of the farmers with designated land for the hen harrier under the GLAS scheme will receive €370 per hectare up to 19 hectares. Next year we will introduce an area based targeted scheme that will allow for extra payments to be made to farmers who have more than 19 hectares of land up to a ceiling which we have not yet set. I do not want to put a figure on it, but the scheme will allow for a significant increase in payments to farmers with much restricted designated land. We anticipate that we might be spending about €23 million per year which is a lot of money to spend in the case of one bird.