Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

When the ACRES programme was expanded from 30,000 to 46,000 earlier this year, farmers obviously signed up on the assumption that if the Government was allowing 16,000 extra applications, there would be capacity in the system to deal with the increase. Clearly, that is not the case. The Department controls the scoring of the scheme and how many people can apply, but between the number of applicants and the complications of processing the new scheme, somehow, obviously, the Department was overwhelmed.

The payments were supposed to be administered in November. How many people were affected by this? At what point did it become clear to the Department that it would be impossible to process every application before the scheduled date? Had a capacity review been conducted within the Department before the scheme was expanded? Why, when it became clear the payments would not be made on time, were farmers not made aware immediately?

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