Farmers are set to stage a protest later today to highlight the mounting anger over the extended delays with payments for GLAS.
ICSA rural development chairman Seamus Sherlock has said that ICSA will stage a protest today at the Department of Agriculture, Johnstown Castle, Co Wexford.
The protest is set to run from 11.30am-1pm.
“ICSA has decided to take this stand to show solidarity with farmers who have been waiting patiently for payment and suffering the consequences of doing without.
“That patience has now run out,” he said.
Payments issue to 1,100 more GLAS farmers
Speaking to Agriland recently, the Minister for State at the Department of Agriculture, Andrew Doyle said payments worth €4.1m issued to 1,164 farmers on Friday.
However, approximately 9,000 farmers participating in the scheme are still waiting on payments to issue from the Department of Agriculture.
Minister Doyle said the problem is not resources but rather the IT system or computer system being used by the Department.
Last week in a statement, the Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed said he was satisfied that every effort possible is being made to complete this process as quickly as possible.
Furthermore, in order to ensure outstanding payments are issued without delay, the Department has said all resources from an IT and administrative perspective are being directed towards resolving the outstanding issues.
All GLAS applications must pass regulatory controls and validations, as is the case with all EU co-funded schemes.
The outstanding cases relate to applications that did not pass these checks and in the majority of cases is due to a query on a selected GLAS action or a land parcel on their holding.
All of these cases must be reviewed on a case by case basis to determine if the actions involved should be removed from the scheme or allowed to proceed to payment.
However, the Department has said that it is not possible to provide a definitive time-frame for the completion of payments due to the individual nature of the outstanding issues, however every effort is being made to process all payments as quickly as possible.