Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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68. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if will he amend the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, application criteria for hill farmers who own their own parcel of land due to the fact under the current measures for accessing GLAS these farmers are prohibited because the land is owned and it is not eligible for any other schemes. [21286/16]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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GLAS is an agri-environment measure under the Rural Development Programme (RDP) 2014–2020 approved by the European Commission and aims to deliver overarching benefits in terms of the rural environment and address European Union issues of climate change mitigation, water quality and the preservation of habitats and species. GLAS is a voluntary scheme under which farmers are compensated for the income foregone. The scheme is designed to specifically target environmental priorities.

Access to the scheme is therefore by means of three Tiers, which allows the most pressing environmental priorities to be addressed in order of importance, but also provides for a broad approach to delivering environmental benefits across all farming systems. My Department has generated a profile of each farm in the country identifying the environmental attributes at farm level.

This structure of the scheme is designed to ensure the targeted and prioritised delivery of environmental benefits drawing from the extensive preparatory analysis underlying the RDP.

There is an internal hierarchy within GLAS of ‘Assets over Actions’. For example, in the case of Tier 1, expenditure will be targeted at the Priority Environmental Assets (PEAs) first before accepting intake from farmers adopting the Priority Environmental Actions.

The overall target for GLAS is to attract 50,000 farmers into the scheme. I am pleased to confirm that some 38,000 farmers have been approved into the first two Tranches of GLAS, 26,500 in GLAS 1 and 11,500 in GLAS 2, while ensuring adequate provisions are available for Tranche 3 of the scheme.

The criteria for selection will be applied to all applications across all farming systems and it is not my intention to seek an amendment of the RDP to prioritise farmers with privately owned hills where no priority environmental asset has been identified.