Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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394. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if he will provide a breakdown, by county, of the number of completed applications received by his Department by the closing date of the Green Low-Carbon Agri-Environmental Scheme; the total number of applicants who registered for the Scheme; the selected actions; the reason that the number registering and selecting actions, but not submitting a completed application, was so high, compared to the completed applications; when data will be available as to the average amount of money each applicant will be entitled to under the Scheme; the number of farmers who have selected Green Low-Carbon Agri-Environmental Scheme+ actions; the number of farmers in both Schemes with commonage; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [20131/15]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Due to the unprecedented level of interest in the scheme I announced an extension to deadline for receipt of GLAS applications on Thursday last.  Farmers and their advisors will now have until midnight tonight, Tuesday 26 May, to submit their completed applications.

  I am delighted with the reaction to the new scheme with over 24,000 applications submitted and it seems very likely that our earlier predictions of some 25,000 applications will be fulfilled or even exceeded, and this is great news for Irish farmers and for the rural environment.

The detail of the actions chosen, the likely average payment, and those likely to qualify for GLAS+ and the number of commonage applicants in GLAS/GLAS+ will require interrogation of all the applications submitted, once the Scheme closes. It is not known how many of the created applications will be submitted in the end and this kind of analysis will be carried out once all completed applications have been received.

A breakdown of applications will be available after the closing date.