Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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30. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if he will provide the appropriate instruction to his Department to pay farmers manually for the period which they are owed and in turn deal with the problems which the information technology department is having before the next GLAS payment in December 2017 (details supplied). [4878/17]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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2016 has been an exceptionally busy year in relation to GLAS with 2016 payments issuing to over 28,500 farmers. In addition 11,500 farmers were processed to approval in GLAS 2 and a further 14,000 new applications were submitted under Tranche 3 which are currently being processed to approval stage with a view to increasing the overall numbers in the Scheme to in excess of 50,000 scheme participants from 1 January 2017.  While payment targets have not been fully met, with 3,000 GLAS 1 and almost 6,000 GLAS 2 payments remaining to be fully processed, this is due mainly to outcomes of the checks required to be carried out on each application.

All data in relation to the GLAS scheme is stored electronically and under the governing regulations everything that can be checked must be checked before any payment can be made.  The Department as the accredited paying agency must ensure that all regulatory requirements are fully observed in processing payments to protect against the risk of future disallowances by the European Commission.  Irrespective of how the payment issues the same checks are required to be carried out.  Therefore, the introduction of a manual system of payment would most likely lead to lengthy delays as the required manual checks were completed. Officials in my Department are now focusing on clearing outstanding payments and the resolution of the issues experienced in this first full calendar year of GLAS payments will remove obstacles and streamline the computerised payment functionality for future years.