Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)
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2. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if his attention has been drawn to the concerns of active commonage farmers regarding implementation of, and criteria for, the GLAS scheme; and the action he proposes to alleviate those concerns. [43097/14]

Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)
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The issue I wish to raise is the criteria for, and the implementation of, GLAS and what actions the Minister proposes to take in respect of the concerns expressed by farmers who wish to participate in this scheme. There are a number of questions. When can they expect their first payment for GLAS? Will farmers be allowed to enter GLAS as individual farmers? When will the management plan be initiated and who pays for it?

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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On the timing of it, I hope to get approval from the European Commission before the end of the year to enable us to open GLAS before the end of the year. I have spoken to farming organisations about the process by which farmers will apply. We are trying to let approximately 30,000 farmers into GLAS in one go. That means there could potentially be 35,000 to 40,000 applications. Each farmer, and a collective of farmers in the case of commonage, will have to sign up to a GLAS plan, and that process will take time. We estimate that it will take at least five months to allow so many applications, as a planner will have to be attached to each one. There are only approximately 400 planners in the country outside of Teagasc. Everybody has accepted that if there will be that many farmers coming into the scheme in the first tranche, it will take some time. My priority is to get as many farmers into GLAS as possible, and to get them into the scheme through an application process that everybody understands and in which they have time to apply for it.

There will be an approval process after the application process, which will also take a couple of months. All the applications will be online, so we should be able to do it relatively quickly. Certainly in the last quarter of next year we should have farmers into a five year GLAS scheme and they should start getting payments for it before the end of the year. That is the process on which we are working. It is the process I have outlined for the last six months in consultations with farming organisations and so forth. If we cannot get the rural development programme, RDP, approved, everything will be delayed slightly. However, we are pushing as hard as we can to get the RDP approved as soon as possible.

I am anxious to get a large number of commonage farmers into GLAS. However, commonage farmers farm collectively - that is what commonage is about - so there must be a commonage plan in the commonage areas which farmers farming in those areas, or at least a portion of them, sign up to in order to qualify for the scheme. As I said earlier, we are trying to be as flexible and reasonable as possible, reflecting the different realities of commonage farmers, while at the same time trying to ensure we get approval from the Commission because much of this money is European money.

Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)
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The Minister's reply indicates that there will be no payment before the end of next year.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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The last quarter of next year.

Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)
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People who are coming out of schemes will have no payment for over 18 months. That will create financial difficulties for the smaller and weaker farmer. Regarding commonage and getting farmers to sign up to a plan, I appreciate the difficulties that will present. Getting everybody or even 50% of people to agree on something will itself create huge difficulties. I welcome the fact that according to the briefing we were given recently, the Department is taking a far more flexible approach to this. That should be encouraged. If only one farmer out of five is prepared to sign up for it, he should not be penalised if the other four do not. I hope that will be provided for.

The Minister said that applications and a GLAS plan can be done without an implementation plan being completed. That is my understanding of the Minister's reply. That means the process can move forward as we wait for the implementation plan, particularly with regard to commonage areas.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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It is important to clarify that regardless of how many shareholders are in the commonage, if a commonage area is to qualify for payments under the GLAS scheme, there must be an expectation, indeed a reality, that certain actions will be taken on that land that go beyond what is required under the basic payments scheme. Under the regulations there must be some added value environmentally from the GLAS scheme. That is the point of the scheme.

We are trying to facilitate a situation whereby half of the active farmers in a commonage area, or half of the land in a commonage area that is being farmed by the farmers, would buy into a commonage GLAS plan for the commonage. They can work through their individual planners if they wish, but they must be working towards one agreed plan. We can then say to the Commission that these are the actions we are paying for and this is what will be done in this commonage to draw down the payments of €5,000 or €7,000 per farmer or shareholder in the commonage. That is the conversation we are having. We cannot simply do away with all of the requirements. There must be a commitment by a portion of the shareholders in the commonage area to ensure that there is added environmental value in that commonage area. From the Commission's point of view, GLAS is not an income support but an investment in an environmental scheme, which is why one must qualify for it.

Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)
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With regard to an overall plan for a commonage area, is the responsibility to pay for that on the people who are applying for GLAS or will the Department pay for it? It appears that if only a small number of people buy into it and there is an overall plan, the onus of paying for it falls on the person who is a recipient. If only two out of five take up the scheme and the other three do not, the two are improving the commonage for the five, even though only two people are buying into it.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Everybody who applies for GLAS must pay the planner for their GLAS plan.

Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)
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What about the overall plan?

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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There will be an individual commonage GLAS plan for each commonage. There is no same overall plan for all commonage areas. There was an idea, and we have moved away significantly from it, that the overall commonage framework plan would implement and force a commonage framework plan on each commonage area.

We have instead moved towards a basic stocking rate requirement on disadvantaged lands and commonage lands to try to make it as easy as possible for farmers to implement. We have said there will be flexibility in terms of the levels of stocking individual shareholders and farmers will apply. We are in discussions with the Commission on whether somebody who has an agreement with another shareholder to cover his or her stocking rate can qualify to be part of the farming and management of that commonage. One example of the flexibilities we have discussed with the Commission are cases where, for example, somebody has an interest in two or three different commonage areas, decides to put stock in one of them and agrees with other shareholders on the other two to cover the stocking rates which would otherwise apply. Such issues have been raised with me and my officials.

Let me be clear. We cannot simply design this scheme to our own liking. It needs European Commission approval because it is funded through the RDP programme which is co-funded by the Commission. It is a fair issue to raise and we are trying to deal with it.