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

This schedule has been the topic of discussion for about a year now. I sat down with all the farming organisations and asked them what their priority was for the new agri-environment scheme, namely, GLAS, which is replacing REPS and AEOS for many farmers. I told them we could allow a small number of farmers in for the first phase, go through the application process quickly because numbers would be relatively low, get approvals in early and get payments out early or we could get many more farmers in, but that would take more time. Every single one of the farming organisations told me the priority was to get as many farmers into GLAS in the first phase as possible. Everybody asked me to do that. That is why we are looking to accept somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 farmers into GLAS in the first tranche. If 30,000 farmers are accepted to a scheme, there could be 35,000 or 40,000 applicants. Outside of Teagasc, we only have 400 planners in the country. This process will take time. Some 30,000 or 40,000 GLAS plans must be put in place and assessed by us, because nobody can get a payment until their plan has been assessed and approved and they have been accepted into the scheme. The plan was that for the first five months of the year or so, we would have farmers applying for GLAS in huge numbers. We would assess all those applications over the summer and make decisions so that people would be accepted into the scheme in September and we assigned approximately €20 million in the Estimates, so that we could pay out in the last three months of the year.

While the application process for GLAS is starting approximately two months later than we had hoped, we will try to stick to the schedule. Farmers have been primed and we hope applications will be submitted as quickly as possible. We will try to have the application process completed by the end of May in order that assessments can be made over the summer and farmers can join the scheme in September. We cannot have it every which way, however, because it is not possible to have an application process for only a couple of weeks for a scheme that will apply to 30,000 farmers.

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