Case study: ‘We were sold a pup on ACRES’

Patrick Murphy, from Mallow, farms on the border between Cork and Kerry. He joined ACRES in tranche one and he had taken part in Green Low-carbon Agri-Environment Scheme (GLAS) previously. He had received a letter complimenting the quality of his land for GLAS.

“With all of your land and features, you’d be able to pull down the full lot of €7,000 and if you have non-productive investments, you’d get up to €10,000, I was told,”he told the Irish Farmers Journal.

“So I signed the contract. Now the full rules weren’t out, but that was fine,” he said.

“The next thing that came up was that I’d have to pay €400 to Teagasc for plans. Then they wanted soil samples, that was another €142. Then Teagasc wanted another €325 each year for doing the scheme with them, on top of the annual fee,” he said.

Murphy said he received no payment until he was in the second year of the scheme.

“In February 2024, I got €5,000. A couple of weeks ago, I received a letter saying that I owed just under €1,700 to the Department. I rang the adviser. I then rang the Department and they told me that I actually owed them €3,334.

“I got €5,000 and I was looking for my other €2,000,” he said.

He said he was then told that maybe all of his land isn’t in the scheme.

“Then the ACRES section said that there was no map with my application for my co-operation land. My adviser told me he had sent it in with the application,” he said, and subsequently found out the map had been in all along.

“It must be the scorecard, I said. I was told nothing from no one. This young fella landed out in late summer last year and scored it. I didn’t get any results.

“I’m going to pull the pin on it. I’ve asked them to send me out the forms to pull out of it. I’ve told the ACRES crowd I’m going to sign it. I’ll owe them €5,000, but I’d rather repay that and be done with it.

“If they offered me €100,000 this minute I wouldn’t take it. I am only getting €1,600 from the scheme before the planning costs of €325 are taken into account and I’m being charged for a system that isn’t doing anything for me. We were sold a pup,” he said.