Government lambasted for leaving Mayo farmers 'in limbo'

Mayo Sinn Féin TD, Rose Conway-Walsh has accused the government of incompetence and total disregard for farm families as 20,000 farmers are still waiting for payments and vital information on scoring results.

The Erris-based representative stated: “The ACRES scheme has been beset by poor organisation, IT problems and numerous false dawns and promises.

"Now people are received letter for clawbacks for money when they still have not even receive their scores.

“When farmers joined ACRES Tranche 1 in late 2022, they were advised their lands would be scored in Summer 2023 and payments would issue in November/December 2023.

“All this was done under the constant threat from the department that if the deadlines were not met serious penalties would fall on the farmers. The one deadline the department had to comply with themselves was to get payments out by the end of 2023 which they failed to do.

“The interim payment made in February after the minister took the unprecedented step of borrowing money from the state to make payments of €5,000 to farmers in the co-operation scheme and 4,000 to those in the general scheme.

“The looming European and Local elections had forced the minister to take this action.

"Now post-election and the department has finally said that they are about to start the payment process for ACRES 2023 payments but that 20,000 farmers will have to wait several weeks while their payments are being processed.

“If a person was due to get €7,000 the maximum payment, then a remittance advice was posted online, only on their agfood account, and the supplementary payment was made to them.

"However, if a farmer is due to receive €3,000 per year and has previously received €5,000 in their interim payment then €2,000 has to be clawed back. The department has said it will be taken from their next grant payment in September/October

“One major issue farmers have with this is a remittance statement is being issued with no indication of how this money was calculated.

"The farmer should be issued with a breakdown of field scores as soon as possible. Most advisers would have indicated to each farmer the scores for their fenced lands, but the scores issued to commonage lands by department staff have not been released. The scores should have been issued with the remittance advice.

“Commonage lands form such a major part of farmers payments especially in Mayo and along the western seaboard that the scores accumulated for these lands are of vital importance to the viability of these holdings.

"The department advised at the start of this scheme if commonages scored badly i.e. if less than four out of ten then no payment for that commonage will issue that these commonage shareholders would be advised at meetings on how to improve their scores in future years.

"The co-operation teams have been advised that none of these meetings can take place until the commonage scores have been revealed to the farmers involved.

“We are now over a year and a half into the scheme which realistically means two years of payments will have gone by without any chance for farmers to improve the scores on commonages.

“Farmers need to have full disclosure of scores for their lands. The minister’s recent statement on this does not mention the delay in issuing scores to farmers and does not state that the Department is setting about recouping monies that were overpaid with the interim payment.

“There are no other workers or no other sector that would be treated this way. Why should farmers have to continuously bear the burden of government incompetency and lack of transparency.”