Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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480. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the reason for delays in GLAS and beef genomics scheme payments; the number of persons affected by these delays in County Donegal; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3960/18]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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GLAS payments cannot issue until all regulatory requirements are met. Each GLAS payment claim must be put through a suite of checks for each action and where any individual check fails the issues must be investigated and resolved before being cleared for payment.

2017 advance payments commenced on schedule in November 2017 and to date the Department has issued advance payments to 41,676 farmers totalling €149m. This represents over 90% of all eligible farmers. GLAS pay-runs are continuing on a weekly basis with further payments scheduled to issue this week as cases are cleared for payment.

In addition to the checks outlined above, in approximately 3,000 cases, applicants remain ineligible for payment until they complete the steps they must take before the Department can process their payment. The general issues preventing payments taking place include the non-submission of nutrient management plans, commonage management plans, low emission slurry spreading forms, rare breeds forms and 2017 BPS application issues that remain to be resolved.

Details of GLAS payments to Donegal applicants as follows

Payments have not yet issued to 192 herds in Donegal under the Beef Data and Genomics

Programme (BDGP) for a number of reasons. The reasons include participants who sought to change their reference year from 2014 to 2017 and which can only be finalised in the coming weeks, herds who have not yet completed all of the actions required under the BDGP and some inspection cases. Payments will continue to issue as cases are finalised and compliance achieved by applicants.