Andrew Doyle (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. We soldiered together ten years on the committee.

My Department has an excellent record in the delivery of high quality ICT systems.  In that respect, my Department is ahead of the rest of our European partners and are also highly regarded across the civil and public service.  We have been consistently among the first to make payments in the EU.

The basic payment scheme, BPS, which is operated from our Portlaoise office, was introduced in 2015, enabling Ireland to be among one of the first member states to make payments under the new CAP schemes. The online uptake for this scheme has increased steadily with more 109,000 applications submitted by this means in 2017. The BPS system has been improved on year on year to make it more farmer-farm adviser friendly.  A total of 99.7% of 2016 BPS applicants have been paid to date while 97.7% were paid on initial date of balancing payments, which is 1 December.

In the context of the Rural Development Programme 2015-2020, RDP, to which the Deputy referred specifically, the Department has delivered more than 20 new schemes that were supported by IT capability over the past two years.  In the first two years of the current RDP, my Department has implemented substantially more schemes than were implemented over the entire ten-year lifetime of the previous RDP programme.  To date Ireland has drawn down funding at a rate 2.4 times higher than the EU average. This rate of delivery and draw-down would not have been possible without the availability of complex IT software systems to support the business units in operating these schemes. Since 2014 my Department has adopted a policy of implementing fully digital end-to-end support for all but the smallest of schemes.

A number of different issues delayed GLAS payments, which I outlined earlier.

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