A total of six projects have been approved for grant aid totalling €1.796 million under the capital investment scheme for the marketing and processing of certain agricultural products in the potato sector.
To date, of the six, three claims for payment have been received. No payment has actually issued to date. The procedure followed in my Department in the evaluation and selection of projects in the potato sector is the same for all other sectors included in the overall scheme. This procedure is as follows. An advertisement is placed in the local, general and farming press. Following this, a total of 28 applications were received from the potato sector, all of which were evaluated by officials in the relevant divisions of the Department of Agriculture and Food, by reference to viability, target markets, sectoral and regional impacts, particularly at primary producer level, and the extent to which they would improve the saleability of the primary product. Two of the applications were found to be ineligible while a third was subsequently withdrawn, leaving a total of 25 applications of the 28 to be considered. Between them, the 25 applications in the potato sector had a grant aid requirement of almost €10 million while the funding available for this sector amounted to €2 million.
Funding under the scheme is limited and eligibility alone does not necessarily confer an entitlement to grant aid. Accordingly, all applications must be subjected to a competitive assessment and ranking process.
The selection committee, which comprises four assistant secretaries of Department of Agriculture and Food and a representative from Enterprise Ireland, met on 20 March 2002 to consider these applications. The committee was provided with information on the potato sector in general, priorities of this sector, details of previous total funding awarded in this sector and an individual fiche, which is a synopsis of the application for each project. Having taken into account the above factors and the individual applications, the committee recommended that seven projects be selected for the award of grant aid.
Additional informationOn 28 March 2002 six projects were submitted to me for approval and I approved these six. A seventh project, while provisionally selected by the selection committee, was not submitted to me pending further investigation into certain aspects of the application. This investigation subsequently proved that this application was ineligible and, as such, was never submitted to me.
I am satisfied that the scheme was correctly and fairly administered by my officials at all stages of the process and I intend to continue the operation of the scheme as set out in the overall marketing and processing programme. It is my understanding that the background to the decision process has been explained in considerable detail to the Deputy.
