Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 14 December 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Agricultural Schemes, Eradication of Bovine Tuberculosis and Compensation: Discussion

Mr. Jack Nolan:

We have approximately 2,100 applications, which is a doubling of what we had. We have 4,000 now, hopefully from the start of next year. We are going through them at the moment, looking at the areas and at the budget. I hope we will be able to write to people in the springtime to say whether they are in or not. In the past, they would not have received any notification until later on in the year, but we will tell them early in the spring because they have to change their practice. We are aiming to bring in everybody we can. I do not know right now, because we do not know the areas, but the scheme will be open again, as planned, at the end of next year. It will open every year because there is a huge appetite there. As Deputy Fitzmaurice said, and as we saw when we went around the country, a lot of people are interested. We hope we will increase every year. We may not double next year in the way we did this year, but we are definitely going to go up by 1,000 or more every year for the next couple of years.