The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Simon Coveney, has announced an extension to tomorrow’s deadline for receipt of GLAS applications.  Farmers and their advisors will now have until midnight Tuesday 26 May to submit their completed applications. 

The Minister said that the level of interest in the new scheme was unprecedented, with over 34,000 applications logged to date and 18,000 applications already submitted.  Another 10,000 have selected actions and begun the process of drawing up farm plans, suggesting that these too are intending to submit an application.  This being the case, the Minister said that he wanted to give as many of those as possible the opportunity to do so, and therefore he had decided to extend the closing date.  This will allow advisors more time to finalise those plans. 

“I am delighted with the reaction to the new scheme,” Minister Coveney said.  ‘It seems very likely that our earlier predictions of some 25,000 applications will be fulfilled or even exceeded, and this is great news for Irish farmers and for the rural environment’.

The Minister stressed that there could be no further extension after Tuesday, pointing out that the closing date for the Basic Payment Scheme (29 May) was also looming and he wanted to ensure that advisors had time to process applications for that as well.

View Press Release as a PDF:  DAFMPR 90/2015 (pdf 361Kb) 

Date Released: 21 May 2015