Between 2016 and 2025, the Department of Agriculture has returned €1.17bn in unspent money to the Exchequer.
That total is more than the entire Exchequer budget allocation to the Department in either 2016 or 2017. Taken as a whole across the decade, Agriculture returned almost €8 out of every €100 it was allocated from Government finances.
While every Government department is expected to run a tiny surplus, the scale of returns and consistency of surplus returns from agriculture are unusual.
Last week, the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General produced the audited appropriation accounts for each department and voted spending area of government.
Agriculture can point to 2025 being the second-lowest level of surplus returns over the last decade (see figure 1), but even this improved performance still leaves Agriculture as the worst of the major departments when it comes to spending its budget allocation (see Figure 2).
Fundamentally, there are two major drivers of surpluses at the Department of Agriculture.
The first is the underutilisation of funding allocated to spending programmes which are demand-led, such as forestry; and, secondly, higher-than-expected receipts from funds received by the Department under its own account and from the European Union under the Fund for Rural Development, Next Generation EU and the Maritime Fisheries Fund.
The receipts received by the Department outside Exchequer funding are known as “appropriations in aid” and totalled €418.3m in 2025, accounting for around a fifth of total spending.
Increased earnings
Beyond EU funds, which made up the majority of those appropriations in aid, there were several areas which saw increased earnings.
The Department received €20.9m from inspections at meat plants, which it said was “primarily due to a larger quantity of animals being slaughtered in 2025,” leading to an increase in overtime inspection receipts. There were also €1.16m in veterinary receipts for the inspection of live animals for export.
Receipts from seed testing came in at €3.697m, far ahead of the projected €1m, which the Department said was primarily due to higher-than-expected annual fees as a result of additional products being registered for certification on the National Pesticides Register.
On spending, the biggest area outside of administration was Bovine TB and brucellosis eradication. The original budget was €73.5m, with a further €63m allocation from the Exchequer in supplementary spending. Final spending on the scheme came in at €122.75m, meaning that was effectively an underspend of €13.8m in the TB scheme in the year.
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the areas in the Department’s budget which saw a significant underspend was administration, which recorded an €8.5m saving, with €2m of th driven by a lower than expect wage bill.
Forestry
Forestry saw an underspend of €8.9m. The Department said: “Forestry schemes are demand led and the 2025 estimate had provided for the planting of up to 8,000 hectares under the scheme. This level of planting did not materialise.” The Comptroller and Auditor General produced a separate report on forestry schemes, noting that the Department’s own finance division has chosen to provide funding in line with an expected demand for 3,000 hectares of forestry planting in 2026.
One area that saw a significant overspend was ACRES. The original budget for the scheme was €260m, with supplementary exchequer funding of €35m. The eventual outrun in 2025 totalled €304.2m. This due to the “complexities involved in delivering the scheme” with payments in 2025 including residual payments from 2023 and 2024.
Disappointingly, payments under the Long Established Young Farmer scheme, known as the Forgotten Farmers scheme, were only 45% of the budgeted €5m at €2.225m. The Department said this was due to “the failure of a number of applicants to meet the terms and conditions of the scheme, resulting in ineligibility for payment”.
Comment
About the only good thing that can be said about underspending at the Department of Agriculture is that the trend seems to be improving in recent years, with less money going back to the Exchequer.
However, even that improved performance has not been enough to halt another trend which has been in place for a number of years – the falling share of total Government spending which is going to the Department of Agriculture (see Figure 3).
In Budget 2017, 2.5% of government spending was allocated to Agriculture. The budget announced earlier this month by Simon Harris, Minister for Finance, saw that allocation at 1.85%.
True, the size of overall government spending has increased significantly over the past decade, but it is reasonable to conclude that Agriculture’s consistent, and sizeable, underspend across that period would have increased the Department’s difficulty in arguing for a larger share of the spending pie when it comes to budget time.
Looking at what is causing the underspend, some of the factors are forgivable, as estimating earnings and demand for particular schemes is difficult. The underspend on the forgotten farmers scheme in 2025, however, is particularly egregious.
Introducing the long-fought-for scheme with a budget of €5m, but then setting terms and conditions that allow for less than half of that money to be claimed by those forgotten farmers, is nothing short of a failure.
For the Minister for Agriculture, it is very important that money can be raised from the exchequer where and when it is needed. But it is even more important to ensure that, when the money is granted, every cent of it is spent. Otherwise, it will be allocated to departments which have a much better track record of fully utilising their annual allocation.
