Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 25 June 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture and Food
Delays in Departmental Scheme Payments: Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
2:00 am
Mr. Paul Savage:
We did, actually. We made it clear towards the end of 2023 that there were going to be delays with the payments. We only made 17,000 or 19,000 payments - I cannot remember the exact figure off the top of my head - but we got those payments out at the end of December. We knew there would be delays and undertook to try to get the payments made by the following February. We communicated with people that we were aiming for that deadline in February. When that was not possible, we moved on to making interim payments to farmers, which went out in March 2024. We communicated with people. We wrote to them and explained the situation. We told them what the arrangements would be in the following months for payments and then potentially having to reconcile those payments and recoup moneys they were overpaid. We were in constant contact with them.
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