THE chair of West Cork ICMSA said that positive ministerial signals on all Tams Tranche 3 applications ‘counts for nothing’ without formal approval.
And he said that some farmers had waited for more than a year for the first tranche of the scheme.
DJ Keohane was speaking following the announcement by the Minister of Agriculture, Food and the Marine that all Tams Tranche 3 applications will be fully approved.
The Timoleague farmer said that members would be unable to proceed until such formal notification was received and the delays involved – already ridiculous – would not be solved until those formal notifications were issued.
‘The reality is that there are still applicants from Tranche 1 who have yet to receive formal approval despite the fact that their closing date was summer 2023, and we know of cases where applications have been submitted for over a year,’ he said.
‘The Department can take as long as they like to issue an approval while, at the same time, writing to some farmers with a query telling them to respond within 20 days or their application will be rejected in full.
‘This is the kind of complete double-standard that has made farmer interaction with the Department so fraught and irksome; there’s one rule for the Department and a second much more abrupt rule for the farmer, while the Minister continues to stall on concluding the Farmers’ Charter that might offer the farmers some protection. How can the Minister stand over a system that has the Department giving the farmers 20 days while they take as long as they like for themselves?
‘How can farmers have confidence to invest if the approval of their investments is delayed so long that the building price quotes contained are completely out of date? Or the Nitrates regulations have changed in the time between the application and approval?’
The West Cork ICMSA chair said the Department needed to prioritise staff to work through this backlog in the next two months and all Tranches 1 through 3 need to be approved ‘formally and in notification’ by the end of June.
With a further tranche of the scheme expected, he said the four tranches scheduled for next year should be ‘set in stone’.
The ICMSA wants the dates on a quarterly basis, giving more certainty to farmers and their advisors, saying there is little point in having certainty on tranche closing dates if approval can take up to a year to come through.
‘This needs to stop and the Minister must address it immediately,’ said Mr Keohane.
THE Dept of Agriculture received 3,802 applications across the 10 Tams 3 measures before the scheme closed on April 12th.
The closing dates for the remaining tranches of Tams 3 to be undertaken in 2024 are yet to be confirmed.
Minister says work is ‘continuing at pace’ on the approval of Tranche 1 and 2 applications. Tranche 4 will close for applications on Friday September 6th and Tranche 5 will close on Friday December 6th.
