I am grateful to you, Sir, for allowing me raise this matter on the Adjournment. It is essential to state clearly that this area aid application scheme must be scrapped immediately. The Minister for Agriculture and Food has unleashed a new plague on this country of which there are reported to be 172,000 cases. This virus is causing otherwise sane people to go absolutely frantic with worry. It is called IACS, the integrated administration and control system, which takes the form of a 16-page questionnaire which, among other things, goes to the absurd lengths of asking farmers to declare the area of any rock outcrops on their farms and to estimate the area of headlands and uncultivated strips of land beside ditches, walls and fences.
It is a measure of the madness which has been engendered by that scheme that none of the normal tasks that should receive attention on farms at this time of the year is receiving proper attention. Farmers should be spraying crops, managing grassland, closing fields for silage and planning their flocks for next year but instead they have been obliged to do these nonsensical sums and worry about whether a neighbour's kale or fodder beet crop will squeeze out a few more acres of winter barley from the national base area. Farmers are spending their days anxiously waiting for maps to arrive in the post and their nights travelling to briefing meetings so that they can be told what this dreadful cursed form is all about. For example, they are trying to calculate whether it would be worth their while to forego premiums on some groups of animals in order to maximise their entitlement to extensification premium.
Farmers who applied to the Ordnance Survey Office for maps to accompany this nonsensical form before 24 March and who were told they would have the maps by 1 May are now being told that they will have to wait for another week. Those who applied after 24 March were told, first, that they would have to wait six weeks but they are now being told they will have to wait seven weeks. It has been reported that there are up to 1,000 unopened applications for maps lying in the Ordnance Survey Office. In desperation farmers are going to the Land Registry, the Farm Development Service and county councils for maps. Only yesterday I was told by a Teagasc officer that one third of the farmers in his area who had received maps were given the wrong maps. It is clear that the system cannot cope.
The Minister's tardy and grudging response today was that livestock producers will not need maps this year and that everybody else will have an extra 17 days, until the end of this month, to submit their maps but they must provide a certificate from the Ordnance Survey Office stating that the application was submitted before 31 March. I am sure that there will be a delay in issuing these certificates from the Ordnance Survey Office.
The chaos goes as far as the Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry. Today, the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Forestry gave a written reply to my colleague, Deputy McGinley, which was not up-to-date on these points. In the face of this chaos the best that the agriculture commissioner in Brussels, Commissioner Steichan, can do is wag an admonitory finger at us and remind us of the penalties for late or erroneous applications. There is no trace of the slightest understanding of the pernicious effects this virus is causing all over the European Community. As I said, this entire scheme is madness and it cannot work.
The united efforts of Teagasc officers who are working overtime, farm consultants throughout the country, officials of the Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, the farming press and the major farming organisations still cannot cope with the pressure in completing these forms. The two Ministers of State sitting opposite, in particular Deputy Treacy, should know this because a couple of weeks ago I met a large group of his constituents who were totally distracted and wondering what they should do about this.
