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

Many farmers in the Deputy's area will be finalising commonage GLAS plans after they have applied and after the deadline. They might be finalising those plans into July. Is the Deputy suggesting that we discriminate against those people in terms of the opening date? I hope he not suggesting this. The point I am making is that we will get this system approved as soon as we can but we will not discriminate against anybody in the process and we will be as fair as we can. When GLAS is fully up and running it will cover around 50,000 farmers and we will be spending about €260 million per year on them. This is a big environmental scheme. This year we have estimated about €20 million, because we know we are not going to be accepting people approved into GLAS until about September, so farmers will only be getting payments for the last few months of the year.

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