The extended deadline for applications for the new Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme (TAMS 3) has moved the scheme from “practically irrelevant to absolutely pointless”.
This is according to the deputy president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA), Denis Drennan who said that the original closing date was already “too far” into the year.
The deadline for Tranche 1 TAMS 3 applications has been extended by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) from June 16, to Friday, June 30, 2023.
Delaying the closing date for applications to the end of the month is “effectively an admission” that TAMS 3 for 2023 is a “write-off as far as progress is concerned”, Drennan said.
“Realistically, the [chances] of getting this work done after getting approval in late September or early October are vanishingly thin,” he said expressing his “deep disappointment and frustration”.
“It was already going to be very difficult to get contractors to look at these projects just as the days get shorter and the weather worsens.
“But pushing it all back like this by another fortnight probably moves that from very difficult to downright impossible,” Drennan, who is also chair of the ICMSA’s Farm and Rural Affairs Committee, said.
TAMS 3
While farmers are constantly being pushed towards timelines for schemes, Drennan said the DAFM itself seems “singularly unready to supervise and run” them.
The ICMSA understood that the delay was as a result of the DAFM’s “inability” to have the Women Farmer Capital Investment Scheme ready, he said, which “we are still awaiting”.
The projects of successful TAMS applicants have thus been delayed, Drennan, who also expressed concern about the current TAMS 3 costings which were updated in quarter four of 2022, said.
Despite being halfway through 2023, the costings are still “unconnected to reality” with no immediate prospect of revisit or re-evaluation, he added.
Drennan claimed that “nobody” had ever been able to establish how the DAFM had arrived at its costings, and said that it is “perhaps time that the DAFM stepped forward to explain”.