The Department of Agriculture has spent €8,297,238 on IT systems over the past three years, new figures have revealed.

In response to a parliamentary question from TD Michael Fitzmaurice, Minister Creed said the delivery of 20 new Rural Development Programme schemes in the past two years would not have been possible without the availability of high-quality complex IT software systems.

“Since 2014 my Department has adopted a policy of implementing fully digital end-to-end support for all but the smallest of schemes.”

The Minister for Agriculture also said the department has an excellent record in the delivery of high-quality IT systems: “In that respect my Department is ahead of the rest of our European partners.”

Processing systems

The biggest spend was 2016, which saw the Department IT bills amount to €3,668,763.

The year previous €2,780,032 was spent and €1,848,432 in 2014.

To date, €7,540,383 has been invested in the development, maintenance and enhancement of the Generic Claims Processing System (GCPS). This software supports the various GLAS, TAMS II, Knowledge Transfer and Organic Farming Schemes in addition to the AEOS and TAMS I schemes.

The remaining money was spent on the Agriculture Field Inspection and Testing System (AFIT) for Rural Development Programme work.

Payments protests

Despite this, IT issues have been blamed for the continuing delays in GLAS, which led to three separate protests around the country this week.

Farmers joined the scheme over two years ago and were due to be paid last October.

However, there are 10,000 farmers still awaiting payments. Meanwhile, there are around 2,500 farmers awaiting their AEOS payments.

The Minister confirmed in a separate response that there are 26 staff assigned to administering the processing and payment of the GLAS scheme.

Approvals and payments for the Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme (TAMS) were also severely delayed throughout 2016 due to problems in IT.

By July 2016, a year after its launch, 4,328 farmers were still waiting for their applications to be processed and a further 2,829 farmers who had received approval were still waiting on their payments.

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Full coverage: TAMS

Full coverage: GLAS