Friday, May 29th is set to be the cut-off date for Basic Payment Scheme applications, according to the Minister for Agriculture, Simon Coveney.
Speaking to the Farming Independent this week, the minister confirmed that the date at the end of May was the most likely date, with the closing date for GLAS applications a week earlier on Friday, May 22nd.
Simon Coveney. Photo Steve Humphreys
While the EU Commission has indicated that it is willing to let Member States accept applications until June 15 in order to facilitate farmers and advisors struggling to cope with the workload created by the scheme, Department of Agriculture officials here are convinced that putting back the closing date would end up delaying the onset of payments, traditionally mid October.
“My priority is to get the payments started by October 16, and there is a concern that pushing back application cut-off points would put too much pressure on the system to be able to stick to that timeline,” said Minister Coveney.
“In my opinion, the end of May is a good middle ground, and I would like to see GLAS coming in a week earlier, purely for good management reasons because planners are going to have a lot on their plates this year,” he said.
However, the minister did not rule out the possibility of the dates being pushed out further.
“If something major goes wrong, we still have flexibility to extend the deadline further, which gives us some breathing space,” he added.
The news comes in the same week that word is filtering back from Brussels that Ireland’s €4bn Rural Development Programme has got the green light from Europe.
Meanwhile, the EU has proposed an €8.6m increase for the CAP crisis reserve to €441.6m. It will mean the deductions to farmer CAP payments increase from 1.3pc in 2014 to 1.39pc this year. If the crisis reserve funds are not used in any given year, EU farmers are reimbursed the difference in the following year. This year’s reserve of €433m has not been tapped yet, despite the difficulties following the Russian ban on EU food.
(Source – Irish Independent – Indo Farming – Darragh Mc Cullough – 01/04/2015)