Women farmers waiting 1,000 days for payment

The Department of Agriculture’s handling of the Women Farmer Capital Investment Scheme (WFCIS) has not been the best.

Last week, we revealed in these pages that 14 months after the scheme finally opened, 643 of the 943 applications made have been approved, but no one has been paid as yet.

One case I’ve heard of concerned a woman farmer, a joint director with her husband in their farming company. Having applied for the scheme in June 2023, she waited six months for a reply.

When it came, she was told she needed her husband’s signature alongside hers on the application. It may be that the partnership’s senior partner needs to sign the application.

However, this response, after such a delay, doesn’t help the scheme’s intent of making women farmers feel recognised and valued after decades of being treated as second-class citizens, both by the State and within farming.

Another applicant received a message telling her that approval for payment couldn’t be completed “as the IT system is not yet completed”.

Seeing as how the women farmer TAMS was announced 34 months ago, that is a pretty lame excuse. Having rightly recognised women farmers as a marginalised sector, and rightly putting a scheme in place to make some redress in that regard, the minister and his Department have failed to deliver on the commitment made.

The money might be on the way, but it’s too long coming. Remember, equipment bought under this scheme cannot be financed by lease or hire purchase, so prompt payment is vital.

According to the Department, payments will commence next month, over 1,000 days since the scheme was announced. I’d imagine 17 September is marked in red on the calendar in the Department’s payment office.

That’s the first day of the National Ploughing Championships, and if payments have not at least started to trickle out by then, Minister McConalogue and his officials are likely to be subjected to strong criticism.

There is a wider point. While it’s understood that the Department’s IT requirements are vast, it’s hard to comprehend that there is such a lack of IT resources that payment can’t be made on TAMS applications which have been approved and have returned all the required paperwork.

Bank balance

If a meat factory or a mart were making such excuses for failure to make payment, questions would be asked as to the health of the bank balance and the cashflow of the business in question.

The Department could hardly have chosen a less appropriate cohort to be left as a low priority than women farmers.