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 are working on clearing that up as soon as we can. We have been working through a number of issues over the past number of months and have been clearing each of those different categories of problem we have. They range from issues around inconsistencies in the information we have on ACRES compared with BISS, for instance, to issues around changes of ownership and of contract with ACRES participants themselves. There are a number of other issues in terms of reconciling data, processing all the information correctly and making sure we can calculate the payments correctly. We are working through those and making payments on a weekly basis to all of the categories of payees I talked about, those being, 2023 balancing payments, 2024 advance payments and 2024 balancing payments. They are receiving payments every week, and as we clear each of those cases, they are being paid within the week afterwards. We expect the remainder of payments to be cleared over the next number of weeks.