Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy is a great man to try to sow worry into farmers' minds. We will give more detail of the GLAS scheme next week when we have further publication of the details of the rural development programme. When the GLAS scheme is up and running it will spend approximately €250 million or €260 million a year. It is a huge scheme. We will try to get as many farmers into it as early as we can and we will try to get payments out as early as we can. The timelines outlined by the Deputy are not necessarily the case. We want to get the GLAS scheme out there as soon as we can, but we must get approval from the European Commission for our rural development programme first. We hope to submit the rural development programme to the Commission for consideration by mid-summer, hopefully by the end of June, which is why we will publish a close to finalised document next week to seek final submissions and comments. At some stage in the latter part of the year we hope to get approval for it, after which we will move to open the GLAS scheme as soon as we can. We will try to accept as many farmers into it as we can from day one, which means we need to give time for the application process because there is much work involved in the applications. We will try to move from these applications to actual payments for the work the farmers must do for them as soon as possible afterwards.

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