Farm inspections leading to late payments

FARMERS in East Clare are concerned at the level of departmental farm inspections that have taken place in the last two months locally and which have led to delays in issuing farm payments.

The delays in these payments, due to notifications of overclaiming or farm inspections, is putting a huge financial strain on local farmers according to Councillor Pat Hayes. He described it as “an attack” on the more marginalised and disadvantaged farmers. 
The Clare Champion understands that up to 45 farmers within one parish were issued with inspection notices in September and October, despite having submitted their claims for payments in May. As a result of these inspections, it has led to the delay in their September disadvantage payment and, in some cases, held up both the disadvantage payments and the October portion of the Single Farm Payment.
“Why are the inspections taking place at the end of the year when farmers applied for their payments in May? Why have inspections been left to September and October when farmers are due to get payments? I’m not criticising the inspectors but there is an effort here to save money off the rural farmers and, particularly, those who have been struggling the most with poor-quality land and with the poor weather. I know a number of farmers fined due to overclaiming on payments and in a lot of cases, the issues raised were outside of their control, they couldn’t get into lands to cut them back. I believe this is another marginalised attack on the most affected rural farmers and a threat to the livelihoods of these family farms,” Councillor Hayes said.
He said he is taking soundings right across East Clare on this issue and believes “there are an awful lot of people affected by it”.
Councillor Hayes understands that many of these inspections are being instigated on the back of satellite maps, a new digitised mapping system, which the Department of Agriculture uses to assess whether a claimant has overclaimed. However, what is of concern to Councillor Hayes is the timing of the inspections following the analysis of these satellite maps, at a time when 50% to 80% of a farmer’s income is due in farm payments.
“They would either have got notification that because of these digitisation maps that they had overclaimed. I know of people who were phoned the day before to say inspections will take place in the morning and these were people who were expecting their farm payments in the post that week and there are lots of farmers like that,” Councillor Hayes said.
“The bottom line of it all is that people are not being paid with a lot of applicants around East Clare having their payments held up at the moment due to on-spot farming inspections, due to satellite inspections and this has held up the disadvantage payment scheme as well. So with the myriad of them all, there are a lot of people being caught up and there are a lot of people being processed and fined and they are afraid to appeal because they might lose their money until the new year and they are in need of that money,” Councillor Hayes argued.  
A spokesperson from the Department of Agriculture stated, “The purpose of on-the-spot checks and therefore of control with remote sensing is to verify that the conditions under which aid is granted are met. In practice, for each land parcel claimed under the Single Payment Scheme (SPS), this means checking at least the declared area of the agricultural parcel and the exclusion of ineligible areas from within land parcels.”
According to the department, there were 166 applicants under the SPS in County Clare that had the land parcels declared on their SPS applications selected for checking using satellite imagery in 2012.
Clare IFA chairman, Andrew Dundas commented, “Those letters should be gone out long before now. Farmers apply in May so those initial queries should be gone out long before the first payment is made. All those queries should certainly have been out long before September to avoid payments being held up. I would be very surprised if there are letters going out now showing up problems that weren’t already highlighted. These problems are supposed to be solved before the first payment date, which is for disadvantaged area. All these problems should have been flagged long before now. I’m not aware of many who got notification in the last two months but there is a process there. If they get onto the IFA, they have a dedicated line with the department who can look into these problems. It is not acceptable now to be told of a problem when they should actually be making payments,” Mr Dundas said.
He added that the department is getting “a lot more high tech” and queries on the back on this is “certainly delaying payments”, however, he did not believe it was affecting more farmers than in other years.
“There probably aren’t any more queries this year than in other years but for those affected, it is certainly a huge problem,” he said. 
East Clare Councillor Pat Burke said he too had a number of complaints about the matter since the summer.
“We as farmers, were warned about this.With the new digitising of the maps, farmers were warned that we are getting all this money from Europe and that Europe would be auditing where all this money was going so this led to a tightening up. I accept in the Sliabh Aughty area, that there is a lot of overgrown land and it is very hard for the individual farmer to quantify what he or she should claim on, it is difficult enough. In clearer and better farm land, it is straightforward and there is no such thing as overclaiming. I have great sympathy for those farmers who through no fault of their own put in the same area as they had put in in previous years and it’s catching up on them really,” Councillor Burke said.
He concurred with Councillor Hayes and said the question needed to be asked ‘where were all these applications sitting since May?’
“Some of the farmers who have contacted me have since told me they have got their payment with reductions but the reductions are not major but it depends on the overclaiming. There’s very little to be done, it’s in black and white. There was always the dread there it would be checked on and now it has been but it’s come home to haunt people and there is not a lot to be done. We have a minister going out to Europe arguing for the protection of our Single Farm Payment and on the other hand, he’s being asked where is this money going and we can’t be giving money to land that’s non-productive,” Councillor Burke concluded.