Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge that this has not been our finest hour, but the Deputy should consider this. It was the legitimate ambition of the Department to try to roll out as many schemes as possible at the earliest possible dates, which put significant stress on the administrative capacity of the Department. For example, it would have been easier to defer a number of these initiatives to 2017 and handle the process in a more measured way. Ambition is not a fault, and we are effectively now catching up with the backlog. There are 1,300 approvals from a total of 5,342 applications, but the applications in tranche 3 were only recently submitted. We are rolling out approvals all the time and the first payments will go out late in July. I acknowledge that in an ideal world we would have had the systems in place to deal with all the schemes from day one, but there was much pressure from individual farmers who wanted to carry out investment in early spring on dairy schemes, milking parlours and so on.

In so far as it was possible, the Department tried to accommodate all of them. It would have been easier and maybe in hindsight it was the right thing to do. I am not sure. I think it was right to have the ambition to try to bring the scheme to as many farmers as possible. We are playing catch-up but we are getting there.

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