Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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1078. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the number of dairy farmers subject to a superlevy penalty at present; the total penalty incurred by the State and the amount paid to the European Union to date; when the remainder of the superlevy penalty has to be paid to the European Union; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [10583/16]

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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1079. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine his proposals to defer payments due by farmers to his Department in respect of the superlevy penalty, in view of the serious income problems affecting many dairy farmers; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [10584/16]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 1078 and 1079 together.

As the Deputy may be aware, the facility to phase the final superlevy payment over three years was introduced by the EU Commission last year at Ireland’s request. Farmers availing of the facility must pay at least one third of the bill in each of the first two years (2015 and 2016) with the balance to be paid in 2017.

The Department implemented the scheme nationally and 3,741 farmers (out of a total of 6,109 farmers who incurred the levy) deferred repayments of €35.6m in superlevy liability, (out of a total national levy liability of €71.2m).

The mechanism required the Exchequer to pay the superlevy liability to the EU in full in 2015, and to recover the levy from farmers over the three years from 2015 to 2017. A wide process of consultation in the design of the scheme was undertaken with farm organisations and co-ops and it was agreed that once the initial farmer instalment was paid in 2015, the optimum repayment model for the balancing payments would involve ten equal instalments from the months of May-September in 2016 and 2017.

These amounts will be deducted by co-ops from a farmer’s monthly milk cheques to coincide with the peak milk supply months of April to August. The co-ops will then forward the money each month to the Department. This approach was also agreed as part of the sanction given by the Minister for Public Expenditure Reform.

As part of the discussions in the run-up to the March Council of Agriculture Ministers, Ireland proposed a further deferral of the payment to 2017 and 2018, to ease the financial burden on liable farmers in 2016. However the European Commission advised that the legal basis for the Regulations under-pinning the scheme are no longer in existence and therefore further amendments were not possible. While Ireland suggested a possible alternative legal approach, it was clear that the proposal enjoyed very little support from other Member States and was therefore unlikely to succeed.

On that basis the focus turned to other measures in the package which can be of assistance to Irish dairy farmers to help them through current difficulties, including the doubling of intervention fixed price buying-in thresholds. I did however raise the matter with Commissioner Phil Hogan in our bilateral meeting last week and encouraged him to reflect again on whether a legal basis could be found to facilitate a further deferral in superlevy repayments for farmers.