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

On the timing of it, I hope to get approval from the European Commission before the end of the year to enable us to open GLAS before the end of the year. I have spoken to farming organisations about the process by which farmers will apply. We are trying to let approximately 30,000 farmers into GLAS in one go. That means there could potentially be 35,000 to 40,000 applications. Each farmer, and a collective of farmers in the case of commonage, will have to sign up to a GLAS plan, and that process will take time. We estimate that it will take at least five months to allow so many applications, as a planner will have to be attached to each one. There are only approximately 400 planners in the country outside of Teagasc. Everybody has accepted that if there will be that many farmers coming into the scheme in the first tranche, it will take some time. My priority is to get as many farmers into GLAS as possible, and to get them into the scheme through an application process that everybody understands and in which they have time to apply for it.

There will be an approval process after the application process, which will also take a couple of months. All the applications will be online, so we should be able to do it relatively quickly. Certainly in the last quarter of next year we should have farmers into a five year GLAS scheme and they should start getting payments for it before the end of the year. That is the process on which we are working. It is the process I have outlined for the last six months in consultations with farming organisations and so forth. If we cannot get the rural development programme, RDP, approved, everything will be delayed slightly. However, we are pushing as hard as we can to get the RDP approved as soon as possible.

I am anxious to get a large number of commonage farmers into GLAS. However, commonage farmers farm collectively - that is what commonage is about - so there must be a commonage plan in the commonage areas which farmers farming in those areas, or at least a portion of them, sign up to in order to qualify for the scheme. As I said earlier, we are trying to be as flexible and reasonable as possible, reflecting the different realities of commonage farmers, while at the same time trying to ensure we get approval from the Commission because much of this money is European money.

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