Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would not have been surprised that there were 10,000 registrations on the system. The Minister studiously avoided telling me how many of those are completed applications or how many have just been initiated. I would have expected a big flush in the beginning because of people having done the preliminary work. Could the Minister send me the figure regarding the number of farmers who have submitted a completed final application?

In a reply last week, the Minister told me that there was €1.4 billion for agri-environment schemes under the present CAP, including transitional payments. He might tell me how much of that €1.4 billion relates to the GLAS scheme as opposed to transitional payments.

In the event that there are fewer than 30,000 applications, will the Minister consider approving the applications and letting them become operational as they are processed rather than waiting for everybody to be processed before they are all let go on the same day? The big advantage of that is that people would get payments far earlier and would get a significantly bigger payment this year than if they are all held back until the last application is processed.

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