Luke Flanagan (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent)
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To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if there are funds within his Department to make single farm payments; if he will confirm that he has had hundreds of calls to the disadvantaged payments section of his Department regarding the delay in payments; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [51380/12]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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The two most significant Schemes operated by my Department, in terms of overall expenditure and the support offered to farmers, are the Single Payment Scheme and the Disadvantaged Areas Scheme, which between them, will account for €1.45 billion in payments in 2012.

Mindful of the ongoing difficulties facing farmers, not least the prolonged period of very bad weather which severely restricted farming activity for a substantial part of the year, earlier this year I successfully sought the agreement of the EU Commissioner to making a 50% advance payment of the Single Payment, as and from 16 October – I am pleased to say that, to date, over €600 million has been paid to over 118,000 farmers, these payments being made fully six weeks that otherwise proved for in the governing EU Regulations. The balancing payments will issue in the first week of December.

Insofar as the Disadvantaged Areas Scheme is concerned, despite having to implement changes to the Terms and Conditions of the 2012 Scheme, in order to achieve budgetary savings, there was no resultant delay in the commencement of payments, which began issuing, on target, on 26 September. I can report that, to date, payments worth some €191 million have already issued to 85,972 beneficiaries.

I should add that, in the expectation of many farmers wishing to enquire as to the status of their applications and specifically as to when payments would issue, I established a dedicated call centre, from within existing staff resources, to deal with such enquiries. I can confirm that over the past eight weeks a large volume of calls were processed through the call centre. This approach allowed the maximum number of telephone enquiries to be dealt with, while simultaneously allowing payment processing to continue unabated. I can confirm that it is my intention that every effort continues to be made to maximise payments under both Schemes before year-end.