Paul Kehoe (Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Question 56: To ask the Minister for Agriculture and Food the reason for the delay in issuing the single farm payment to farmers; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [5630/06]

Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)
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The significant task of implementing the single farm payment scheme was successfully achieved when over €1 billion in single payments issued to 118,500 farmers last December, meeting the target we had set ourselves of making the payments on the first possible date. This was a major undertaking and the outcome, after painstaking preparatory work in establishing individual entitlements, was, by any standards, a major achievement.

Under the 2005 single payment scheme, 143,000 applications were received. In addition to those applicants seeking to both activate their entitlements and also receive payment, applications were also received from farmers seeking only to activate their entitlements. It will be recalled that farmers who did not seek to activate their entitlements in 2005 would, under the EU rules, forfeit these entitlements to the national reserve.

Currently, total payments amount to €1,126 million with 97% of farmers, who hold entitlements and applied for the single payment scheme, paid. In common with the coupled schemes, which the single payment scheme replaced, delays in processing can be caused by many factors, including incomplete application forms, errors on applications and discrepancies highlighted following computer validation, which must be resolved via correspondence with the applicant. In many cases, payment could not be made because applicants did not submit an application to transfer the single payment entitlements, with lands, by way of inheritance, gift, lease or purchase. Many of these applications were only received after my Department made direct contact with the farmers in question, during recent weeks, and some have yet to be submitted.

The ongoing objective of my Department is to make payments to all of those farmers who have yet to receive their payment or are entitled to a supplementary payment as soon as their cases are cleared for payment. Every effort is being made by my Department to resolve the outstanding cases but many of these are extremely complex and, in other cases, my Department is still awaiting documentation and applications for the transfer of entitlements before payment can be made. A number of payment runs continue to be made weekly as the more complicated files are cleared.