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

It is important to note that we cannot legally pay a farmer for a time period in which he or she is not in the scheme. The answer to the Deputy's first question is "Yes"; I am confident we can get this done by the end of the year. In fact, I hope we can get it done before the end of November, so that we can open up the GLAS in December and farmers will have the four to five-month period which everybody agrees is necessary, because of the numbers involved in the scheme, to get their applications in. We will then need a couple of months to assess those applications. If we get them in by May or June of next year, it will be September before we can decide on the 25,000 to 30,000 farmers who will be accepted into the scheme. Once they are accepted, participants will receive payments from that point onward. If it is October, November and December of next year, then payment will be on the basis of those three months in 2015.

I assure the Deputy that we want to get payments out as quickly as we can, but there is a process that must be gone through.

As I said earlier, if I accepted 6,000 or 7,000 farmers into GLAS, it could be done much more quickly and they would be in far earlier but that is not what farm bodies wanted. The demand from all stakeholders was that they wanted as many farmers in as possible in the first tranche of GLAS and we are trying to accommodate that but it will take a bit of time.

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