Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In recent years, there have been significant underspends in the Department's accounts when they were published at the end of the year. That has been a constant during the Minister's stewardship of the Department. The underspend varies from €30 million or €40 million to over €100 million. It is now December and the Minister is coming forward with Supplementary Estimates. What will happen when those figures are published some time in 2020? Will there be another underspend across the overall Department Vote?

I wish to raise a few different matters. The BEAM scheme, which was co-funded by the Department and the European Commission, only covered the period from September last year to May of this year. Only half of the Department's national Exchequer contribution to that scheme was used up due to an underspend. There was a particular underspend in the suckler sector as opposed to the fattening sector. The Minister presented a rationale to the European Commission, which it accepted, that the BEAM scheme needed to cover the period from September until May because of the very high losses incurred by farmers during that time. Given that losses post May were even higher, and given that only half the national Exchequer allocation was used, the Minister has no defence for not returning to Europe to seek an additional scheme to support the beef sector due to the traumatic year it has had income-wise. That needs to be addressed. The Minister should be reallocating some funding in order to get an extension to that BEAM scheme, flawed as it was, at European level.

I refer to the rural development programmes. Could the Minister give us a synopsis of where he is at regarding the likely spends across the various schemes, as well as the outlined overall commitment to those schemes? We are behind the curve on a number of them, including the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, the beef data genomics programme and the organic farming scheme, which had a significant number of applicants, the majority of whom were refused again. There was an underspend of €8 million in the organic farming scheme. Given that a transitionary period will be in place post 2020, and given that we need to continue many of our Pillar 2 schemes, I ask the Minister to address the matter of farmers coming out of the agri-environment options scheme, AEOS, who are blocked from GLAS as it is not accepting new applicants. As a result, a significant number of farmers cannot currently apply for any environmental schemes. That is a very poor harbinger for what might happen in 2021, as we are not facilitating those farmers entering an environmental scheme at the moment. I would not want that to become the form in 2021, when many farmers in GLAS 1 will have received their final payment.