Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 3 July 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Agricultural Schemes: Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
5:30 pm
Mr. Paul Savage:
I will take the second question first because it relates to what the Deputy asked about ACRES. With regard to TAMS being slow enough in getting up and running, we must bear in mind the challenge. Consider the timeline for what we had to put in place under the CAP strategic plan. We got our formal approval from the Commission on 31 August of 2022. We have been trying to scope out and design our systems but, in effect, until we got the approval from the Commission, we did not know for sure what the detail of the schemes was going to be. That was from August 2022. We had to have schemes up and running and in place in 2023. We went ahead and introduced 15 of the 18 CAP strategic plan schemes in 2023 across pillars 1 and 2. There was a major effort across the board in introducing all of these schemes concurrently. It was not just about introducing the schemes. We had to roll out the schemes while putting administrative structures and new IT systems in place. It required significant co-operation and project planning to put all of those things in place concurrently. This goes to the point made by the Deputy about not wanting to change the pitch totally every five years. If we can avoid doing that, then we absolutely must. If we can minimise the overall development work-----