A total of €9.3 million has been issued so far this year under the Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme (TAMS) – with €44.5 million paid out under the scheme to date, according to the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Michael Creed.
Minister Creed made the announcement when asked by independent TD for Galway/Roscommon Michael Fitzmaurice what the budgeted spend for the TAMS scheme was in 2016 and 2017.
Minister Creed said: “The TAMS II scheme has been very successful to date in terms of the number of applications that have been approved, which now stands at over 13,000.”
Payments cannot issue until the approved works have been completed and a payment claim is submitted to the online system, the minister added.
Expenditure on TAMS II in 2016 was €3.9 million and in 2017 was €31.3 million. 2018 has seen a significant acceleration on the spend, with €9.3 million paid out this year to date.
“To date, the total spent on TAMS II schemes is €44.5 million,” Minister Creed said.
TAMS Expenditure
Deputy Fitzmaurice also asked Minister Creed the cost of implementing the TAMS II scheme to include the staff and expert fees that developed the scheme – in addition to the cost of the information technology infrastructure.
In response, the minister said: “TAMS II is one of a number of schemes rolled out across the department under the Rural Development Programme.
As with other RDP schemes, a range of department staff have inputted and continue to input to both the design and implementation of the scheme from areas such as policy development, IT and the inspectorate.
He added that – given the number of these schemes commencing and in operation at any one time, and also the residual infrastructure from previous RDP schemes which is used for schemes under the current programme – it is not possible to accurately disaggregate the figures requested from the overall expenditure to outline the costs for any single scheme.
“To date, the TAMS scheme is operating extremely efficiently and over 13,000 approvals have issued to farmers across the country to invest in the infrastructure of their farms. Payments are now averaging over €1 million per week to farmers,” Minister Creed concluded.