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:
The reason for that remaining number is essentially around the change of ownership cases I referred to earlier such as farm partnerships and other change of ownership-type situations. Almost all of the outstanding cases fall into the bracket. We have been working to try to resolve those over the past while and we will work through those over the next number of weeks. As I said earlier, we made a decision that we wanted to fix the underlying problems in the system so that we did not have to resort to manual or paper-based payments to farmers. They would only discommode farmers every year for the next couple of years and would also make it difficult for us to implement in the Department. We are tackling the problem on the basis that we fix it permanently so that it does not recur in the future. That is the reason those cases have not been paid to date. That is also the reason we are also focussing intently on getting them processed as quickly as we can.