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The administration of the Green Low-carbon Agri-environment (GLAS) Scheme has been a shambles, Fianna Fáil’s spokesperson on agriculture, Charlie McConalogue has said.
Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal, he said that the Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed has to take a lot of responsibility for it.
“The administration of the GLAS scheme has been a shambles in relation to the way that farmers have been left without payments.
“Overall, what we’re seeing as a result of the poor management of the RDP, is an underspend across a number of schemes.
“The commitment with GLAS was that there would be €250m a year.”
The Donegal TD said that as a result of poor administration of schemes farmers are losing out.
On the Knowledge Transfer Programme, he said that the take up of it is nowhere near what it was outlined to be and that’s because of the red tape involved. There’s been some farmers falling off from it too, he said.
Chronic underspend
“The most chronic underspend at the moment is in relation to the TAMS scheme. It was very slow to be rolled out.
“There’s also been slow take up of TAMS with the farming community, I think part of that is down to investment issues, the wider economic climate and the pressures on farming income in the past year or two.
“Alongside that, the way that the Department is administrating it … anywhere where there’s a small mistake made in it at all, it’s delaying the draw down and creating real difficulties in the Department in relation to paying farmers.”
Individual basis
McConalogue said that the Department simply doesn’t seem capable of being able to look at each case on an individual basis and to try and take a reasonable approach to actually making sure applications are processed and dealt with.
“That’s a feature across all rural development programmes, it’s meaning that payments are being delayed and that rural development programmes are getting bogged down.”
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