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

I remind the Deputy that the 22 May deadline already represents an extension of three weeks on what the original date was planned to be. We have already provided some extra space. We do not necessarily have a principled reason for not extending the deadline. I am going to be under a great deal of pressure from the Opposition to make sure we get the GLAS payments out this year. The sooner we get the applications in, the sooner we can process them and the sooner we can start paying. We anticipate that we can get in approximately 25,000 applications in the first round. That would actually be a pretty good result. Farmers who do not manage to get in under the first tranche, for various reasons, will be able to get accepted anyway in September and will essentially start their payments from 1 January 2016, as opposed to 1 October 2015. That is a gap of just three months. When there are 30,000 people wanting to get into a scheme, there will always be people at the deadline who are not quite ready and there will always be planners who would like a little more time. If I were to push this back by another week, I guarantee the Deputy that we would have the same thing at the end of the week after 22 May. The problem is that we would have a week less to assess all of these applications and to get payments out. I am really anxious to ensure we stick to the original timeframe I have been setting out for the last 18 months, or certainly the last 12 months. All of our timescales are drawn up with the aim of getting payments out in the last three months of this year in mind.

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