The interim payments under the Agri Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) announced last week “need to be hitting past 80% of the total due”, the Irish Natura and Hill Farmers’ Association (INHFA) has said.
On Friday (February 9), Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue confirmed that an interim payment will be made to participants in tranche 1 of ACRES who have not yet received their advance payments.
Minister McConalogue said that, following the commencement of advance payments to ACRES general participants in December, work has continued on the processing of further general advance payments. However, that work is unlikely to be completed for some time yet, the minister suggested.
Speaking at the annual general meeting (AGM) of the Donegal branch of the INHFA the same evening, the minister said that the payments to ACRES General and ACRES Co-operative participants would be “substantial”.
INHFA president Vincent Roddy welcomed the interim payments, but said that the rates of these payments “need to be hitting past eighty percent of the total due with the ambition to get all farmers paid within the next two weeks”.
Minister McConalogue indicated on Friday that more information will be made available from this week, and that his intention is to have interim payments delivered by the end of this month.
The decision to provide interim payments will, according to Roddy, “provide room to address the very contentious issue of turbary rights on commonage lands”.
The INHFA said last week that it had become aware of an apparent proposal to introduce a “buffer zone” of 100m around active turbary areas on commonage land for the purpose of scoring the land for ACRES payments.
According to Roddy, when this buffer is applied, there could be a significant impact on the overall habitat score on commonages where there is active turf cutting, which would be likely to impact payment rates.
The INHFA president said that the minister indicated a willingness to resolve this issue when addressing the association’s members in his own constituency of Donegal on Friday night.
However, there are broader, longer-term concerns around this buffer zone than just farm payments, Roddy claimed.
“There is a real danger that ACRES becomes a very divisive issue across our hills and commonages, as this issue doesn’t only concern farmers. It has the potential to divide entire communities and create rifts that will still exist when ACRES is nothing more than a distant memory.
“It is vital that the 100m buffer and weighted average are reassessed, and we are encouraging the minister to go back to the position that we understood had been agreed last May and confirmed by Minister Pippa Hackett in reply to a parliamentary question,” he said.