Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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The information requested by the Deputy is set out below:

The €217 million capital allocated in 2016 to my Department referred to by the Deputy was increased to €229m when the €12m capital carried into 2017 from 2016 is taken into account. Of this €160.1 million was allocated to cover capital expenditure under the Rural Development Programme, Seafood Development ( the European Maritime & Fisheries Fund Operational Programme)and Forestry programme. The Forestry programme allocation of almost €112m shown in the table below includes the €12m carried over amount.

Clearly expenditure in 2016 for these schemes/programmes was lower than the estimated provision, but in each case I am confident that 2017 will see more substantial drawdown.

- Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme – Since TAMS II was launched in late 2015 more than 6,900 approvals have been issued to farmers. These approvals under Tranches 1 to 5 allow farmers a three year window in which to complete their investment works and make a claim. The 2016 outturn of €7.8 million against the budget of €35.8 million includes payments for only 309 TAMS II grants as well as residual payments under the previous TAMS I schemes. This clearly indicates that many approval holders choose to delay activating those approvals in 2016 but I expect there will be far greater activity in 2017. Furthermore for future tranches the validity period of the approvals has been reduced.

- Forestry – The new afforestation target of 6,500ha was achieved in 2016 but there was a lower than expected drawdown of premia payments for existing forestry for a number of reasons including where forest owners do not apply for their premia, possibly to allow premia to build up to be claimed at some future date, or non-payment of premiums because of poor forest maintenance. Also, under the Forestry Support Scheme, there was a substantial shortfall on forest roads expenditure, however, the implementation of a single consent system for planning forest entrances is anticipated to increase applications to build forest roads and substantially greater expenditure in 2017.

- 2016 was the first year of implementation of the EMFF Operational Programme and most of these schemes attracted satisfactory levels of applications. While payment claims were relatively low for a range of reasons, I anticipate a substantially higher level of draw-down in 2017 as projects are initiated and/or completed.