The Department has given no indication that it will significantly improve its communications with farmers despite comments by the Minister for Agriculture, Simon Coveney recently.
In response to questioning from Agriland as to whether it will be changing its telephone service, the Department said it is keeping the situation with regard to telephone calls under ongoing review and provides additional resources to deal with calls as the need arises at peak times, such as prior to scheme closing dates and during periods when advance and balancing payments are made.
It said that over the past number of weeks the Department has assigned a large number of additional, experienced staff to deal with telephone calls.
It says the number of calls has dropped considerably with the improved response times.
At the recent ICSA Annual Conference, the Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney admitted that there have been problems around the communications of farmers’ payment status.
“Farmers have been picking up the phone looking for the status of your basic payment or other scheme and you probably didn’t get the answer you were looking for.”
He admitted the Department’s new system for dealing with queries hasn’t worked. “…where we separate the experts from the people on the phone, but then the people on the phone didn’t have the expertise to give you the answers you needed.
“I’m sorry about that. I’ll make sure we learn lessons about it and fix it,” he said.
Over the past number of months, there has been increasing disquiet in the farming community over problems contacting the Department of Agriculture.
The issue was raised at a recent Farmers Charter meeting, where the ongoing problems farmers are encountering making telephone contact with the Department, in order to resolve problems or deal with outstanding queries, was heard.
IFA Deputy President Tim O’Leary said farmers are very frustrated with the inadequate telephone service from the Department of Agriculture and it was outlined at the meeting that this will be fully reviewed and overhauled for 2016.
He said it is essential that farmers have full telephone access to the Department of Agriculture at all times so ongoing issues can be quickly resolved and bottlenecks avoided.
He said it is essential that farmers have full telephone access to the Department at all times, so ongoing issues can be quickly resolved and bottlenecks avoided.
The Macra na Feirme President Sean Finan also recently highlighted the annoyance of farmers over their difficulty in communicating with the Department of Agriculture to establish the status of applications.
Finan said if farmers knew the status of applications and the lines of communication with the Department of Agriculture were open, then this would ease the frustration experienced.