Aontú Senator, Sarah O’Reilly, has alleged that the Department of Agriculture are ‘making up excuses’ in relation to drastic delays in the issuing of acre payments to farmers.
She raised the matter in the Seanad today.
Senator O’Reilly said:
“Aontú is calling on the Minister for Agriculture to be brought in before the Seanad to explain why so many farmers have experienced savage delays in receiving their acres payments. I’ve been working on multiple identical cases in my home county of Cavan where farmers have not received payments for a period stretching back to 2023. I engaged with the Department on these issues and initially they tried to suggest it was the farmers own fault sighting penalties as the issue – that they may have failed a farm inspection, or may have previously received an overpayment, and so on”.
Senator O’Reilly continued: “Upon investigation I found this not to be true, the farmers had done nothing wrong. Then the Department’s excuse changed – they began to suggest there was a technical issue, but wouldn’t say if this was on their end or the farmers’. The terminology the officials were using while talking to me did sound scripted. Then they suggested it was an “IT issue “and a “functionality issue”, and then they refused to explain the issue to me. I was promised in December that “payments would issue in January” and as recently as yesterday I was promised that “payments would issue in mid-March”,
“At this point I have strong suspicions that the scheme has actually run out of money and that this is why payments are not being made. We know that the acres scheme has been strongly subscribed to, perhaps to an extent greater than the government anticipated. The tragedy here is that these farmers are actually out of pocket, because they spent a lot of money, making improvements so they could comply and qualify for the scheme and now they’re left in the dark, and being told that the fault is on their end, when we know it isn’t. This is so frustrating to farmers, especially to elderly farmers in rural areas, who don’t know much about computers or IT. Aontú believes there needs to be an apology for the attempt to scapegoat and gaslight the farmers, there needs to be an explanation from the Minister as to why payments have not been made, and there has to be immediate payment and back payments to all the farmers in question”, concluded Senator O’Reilly.
