Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for their opening statements, for being here and for all of the work the Department's staff do to ensure farmers get their payments. That needs to be acknowledged from the outset. It is a big task and we recognise that.

To go back to ACRES, one of the frustrations for farmers was they applied for the scheme, there was a lot of work involved with planners coming out to do all of that work, they waited to get their scores and could not get them. They did not know where they stood. Then they received a cheque in the post with an interim payment and even before they received their scores, they received a demand to return some of that payment. The witnesses can understand their frustration.

As I said at the first meeting of the committee, if we are able to do nothing else, then we need to recognise that the Department has a huge role to play in ensuring farmers receive their money. The one thing we can control is that. We cannot control the weather, prices or other things. When a scheme is set up that farmers buy into, go with good faith and make the arrangements to do the tasks they are asked to do but then do not get their money and there are continuous delays, it causes a huge level of mistrust of the Department. That needs to be acknowledged as well. I am not blaming any individual for this but there is clearly a problem, particularly when it comes to the IT systems. Most of the farmers in ACRES were in a previous environmental scheme with the same lands. Very little has changed. Most of them have the same plots of ground they had in previous schemes such as GLAS and they are totally at a loss to understand how and why these issues keep coming up every time. Every time there is a new scheme, a whole new mechanism has to be put in place to deal with it. Can there not be a carryover across rounds?