Advance payments totalling €179 million have been issued to more than 85,000 farmers under the Areas of Natural Constraints (ANC) scheme the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine confirmed today (Tuesday, October 17).
Minister Charlie McConalogue said: “The issuing of payments under the ANC scheme is crucial to farm families and I know the importance of getting payments out as quickly as possible.
“Payments will be visible in farmers’ bank accounts in the coming days and my department will continue to process, as a matter of urgency, all remaining cases for payment as they meet scheme criteria.”
Minister McConalogue said the start of ANC payments from today is “a significant milestone achieved”.
According to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM), the ANC scheme was established because “people farming land in designated areas face significant hardships from factors such as remoteness, difficult topography, climatic problems and poor soil conditions”.
The minister had intense criticism levelled at him following a delay this year in the payments made to farmers for the Basic Income Support for Sustainability (BISS) – the replacement for the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) in the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – and the Areas of Natural Constraints (ANC) scheme.
The ANC scheme payments were pushed back by about a month to today, while the BISS payments will be made from October 24 – a delay of around two weeks compared to previous years.
Minister McConalogue had said the delay in payments was because the new CAP had come into force this year.
He previously told the Dáil: “This CAP is dramatically different to that which preceded it.
“A whole suite of new schemes, new reporting requirements, new applications systems, and new monitoring and control systems have required significant redevelopment of many of my department’s I.T and administrative systems.”
According to the minister almost €1.8 billion will be paid to Irish farmers in the final quarter of this year.
But farming organisations have been highly critical of the delay in payment to farmers.
The Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) had said any delay in farm payments was “100% because of unilateral action and poor planning by the minister and his department”.
Meanwhile the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) had also warned that any delay in payments would have a serious knock-on effect for farmers.