Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I propose to take Questions Nos. 57 and 78 together.

I thank Deputy Ó Cuív for raising this issue. I know it is particularly important to farmers in Galway and Mayo, as it is in Donegal. Either Galway or Mayo has the highest number of ACRES participants, at more than 5,000, which is over one ninth of the national total. The scheme has been quite popular for people to engage with. There are issues with the practicalities of rolling it out. The particular challenge with ACRES is different from the other schemes we have done this year in that it has been a challenge with getting payments out on time. We hoped to have that done by December but that was not possible. We hoped that the systems would be finalised in time to do it for February and, again, that has not been possible, so that work is ongoing.

I have intervened to decide that there will be an interim payment, which will be issued by the end of this month. That interim payment will be at the rate of €4,000 to farmers who are in the general scheme and €5,000 to those who are in the co-operation scheme. That means that by the end of this month, every single farmer, bar none, who participated in ACRES last year will have received a payment. It will either be the payment they got in December, if they have already been paid, or the €4,000 or €5,000 now. Work is continuing on finalising the build-out of the system around ACRES. It has proven to be the most logistically challenging of our schemes for the team to work through. The balancing payments will be made in June to net off the €4,000 or €5,000 that the farmers will receive by the end of this month against what their final payment would be.

See this speech in context