Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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I know the Senator has been advocating very strongly regarding ACRES. The Burren life project and the hen harrier project are two exceptional examples of how farmers can work together to make a real impact. Both schemes were established under the European Innovation Partnership, EIP, pilot project funding. The idea behind EIPs is that you road-test something, which normally necessitates more funding. It takes a lot of application, time and commitment on the part of farmers to do that. It then involves seeing how you can scale it more broadly and learn from that. That is what we are doing with regard to the Burren life project in terms of scaling that. This means that many more farmers will benefit from that and those who benefit from it will see increased payments. However, there is an issue regarding some of those in the initial EIP and who would have significant annual payments. Most who were involved in the initial EIP will see their payments increase but a minority could see a significant decrease, something Senator Dooley, as well as Senator Garvey and other Members from the county, brought to my attention. It is something I will continue to consider. Our key objective has been to work hard and my team and the Department have worked extremely hard to ensure we can accommodate all 46,000 applicants. We budgeted for 30,000. Thankfully, this week, we have been able to indicate that we will be able to approve all 46,000 applications, which is a big step forward. It means that all those people will be able to participate in ACRES this year and contribute to the environmental work we are doing and receive a payment but I will reflect further on the point raised by Senator Dooley.