The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine has said that his department is ” on track to make advance payments to Agri Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) farmers by the end of November”.
Minister Charlie McConalogue told the Dáil that he wants “to make sure as we get into year two, payments happen when they should and on schedule”.
However, Minister McConalogue did acknowledge that “there are a number of issues that have to be worked through in cases where people have not been paid yet” in relation to ACRES.
He told the Dáil: “By last March, everybody had received either their 85% advance payment or an interim payment of €4,000 or €5,000.
“Since then, balancing payments have been issuing. As of the end of August, 82% of farmers had received their outstanding balance.
“The team has been working with the objective of, by the end of this month, having 95% of all balancing payments made”.
ACRES
According to Minister McConalogue there are “a number of IT systems in place to administer” ACRES.
“Those had to be built and operated for the first time, which obviously brings challenges.
“The objectives are to ensure the issues we saw in the administration of the first year are fully resolved for year two and that the advance payments for this year are made by the end of November. We are on track to do that,” he added.
The minister faced a series of difficult questions on ACRES during the Dáil debate which also saw his Fianna Fáil colleague, Clare TD, Cathal Crowe, tell him that “the ACRES scheme is all-important but many farmers do not yet trust it or believe it can work”.
Deputy Crowe said: “The ideals of it are good but payments did not reach many people on time.
“There is still huge concern that the administrative functions of the department did not crank properly to get applications processed and payments issued.
“Then there are the scorecards.”
According to Minister McConalogue 35,000 scorecards have been issued but he admitted that there “has been frustration concerning the uncertainty around scores”.
“The scoring is really important and scorecards continue to go out. The payment the farmer gets is entirely dependent on the score.
” I accept that farmers need to get their scores so that they know what steps they can take,” he added.