Cheques worth €441 million issued to farmers from the Department of Agriculture and Food will arrive at farmhouses over the State this morning and tomorrow.
The amount, if divided equally among the 100,000 Irish farmers, would amount to €4,410 a farm and is 20 per cent more than usual for payouts at this time of year.
That is because the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, argued successfully that because of the bad weather and product prices, Irish farmers should receive 80 per cent of what they are due rather than the normal 60 per cent.
The payout, which has been criticised by the anti-Nice lobby as a bribe to the farming community to vote Yes in the referendum on Saturday, comes on top of another round of payments for area aid, worth €200 million, which is being paid out since September 23rd.
Today's payments are for the suckler cow premium (€123 million), ewe premium (€95 million), special beef premium (€92 million), slaughter premium (€75 million), arable aid (€51 million), and the national envelope (€5 million).
The Department said 75,600 farmers would receive the special beef premium payments, 45,300 the suckler cow premium, 71,400 the special beef premium, 32,400 the national envelope, 34,600 the ewe premium and 14,000 arable aid payments.
Farmers have already received in excess of 1.4 million cheques since January 1st last valued at over €1.1 billion under the various premiums, arable and compensatory allowance schemes.
This compares with €839 million at this time last year.
Commenting last night, Mr Walsh said this was the highest level of payments yet achieved at this time of the year.
He added that a number of farmers were not relying on the postman for their cheques but had their payments made directly to their bank accounts and it was the intention to extend the electronic transfer facility to other farmers in the near future.
In 2000, direct payments accounted for 68 per cent of Irish farm incomes and 50 per cent of the payments went to the 50 per cent of farmers with the highest income.
A total of 18 per cent of farms had farm income of €25,396 but 41 per cent of farms had a family farm income of less than €6,349 in the same year.