The Department of Agriculture spent more than €7.5m on its computer systems, development and maintenance in the period 2014 to 2016.

Some €7,540,383.30 was spent on computer systems for processing farmer payments, the Generic Claims Processing System (GCPS) software, Minister Michael Creed said, responding to a parliamentary question from Roscommon-Galway TD Michael Fitzmaurice in February.

The GCPS is used in the GLAS, TAMS II, Knowledge Transfer and Organic Farming Schemes, as well as AEOS and TAMS I schemes.

Last year, the Department spent €1.43m on capital expenditure on IT.

By mid-April this year, it had spent almost €87,000 of its €2.9m budget on capital expenditure.

According to Minister Michael Creed: “The vast majority of the capital projects are awaiting the finalisation of several large IT infrastructure-related tenders.”

Minister Creed said the headline capital IT expenditure items for 2017 include updating the servers, workstations, video conferencing facilities and disaster recovery.

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