According to details released by Minister for Agriculture, Simon Coveney, the most popular action in the new agri-environmental was Low Input Permanent Pasture which was selected by 20,000 applicants (75%).

Protection of watercourses was another popular choice by 10,000 farmers, while large numbers also chose a variety of actions designed to protect birds, bees and bats. In fact, actions addressing every single objective have been selected by farmers in this first tranche.

The Minister sees GLAS as a huge success and welcomed the number of commonages which have come into GLAS – applications in respect of just under 2,700 commonages, or well over half of all commonages in the country, have been received.

Some 4,000 individual GLAS applications from commonage farmers were received, but the Minister pointed out that another 5,000 commonage farmers are already in AEOS with time left to run on those agri-environment contracts. “These farmers are only likely to join GLAS when their AEOS contracts expire,” the Minister said, adding that specific provision had been made to accept these farmers into the scheme in due course. “By any standards, GLAS is already a huge success and it is clearly going to play a key role in the protection of our rural environment over the new programming period”.

Some of the highlights identified by Minister Coveney are as follows:

180,000 ha of permanent pasture will be conserved

8,000 km of water courses will be protected

40,000 ha of endangered bird habitat will be brought under sustainable management

50,000 ha of other Natura habitat will be protected

1,300km of new hedgerows will be planted

2,000 new groves of native trees will be established

1,000 new orchards of traditional Irish varieties will be planted

6,000 km of stone walls will be protected

6,000 new habitats will be created for threatened solitary bee species

90,000 bird boxes and 80,000 bat boxes will be erected

2,700 commonages will be brought under new Commonage Management Plans