The closing date for receipt of the special Area Aid form from farmers has been extended.
The Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, announced he had extended the closing date to April 26th.
Mr Walsh said the extension was an exceptional arrangement to facilitate those farmers who had encountered difficulties with the postal system this year.
The penalty procedure for the late submission of applications will not now apply until after the April 26th deadline.
This year will see the end of the enormous bureaucracy involved in claiming direct payments under the various schemes run for the EU by the Department of Agriculture. The Department will in future be accepting one form a year from the 136,000 farmers rather than the half a million applications it received for the various schemes.
This is because Ireland has opted to decouple farm production from the EU farm payments in the mid-term review of the Common Agricultural Policy.
The new annual single payment, which will roll together the various payments farmers had been receiving up to this year, will now be based on the entitlements of farmers in the three years, 2000, 2001, 2002, divided into the area farmed.
In the current year, for instance, farmers made 64,000 applications for the suckler cow premium, 173,000 for the special beef premium and 92,000 applications for the slaughter premium.
In addition, there were 36,000 ewe premium applications submitted, 98,000 forms outlining stock rates and 16,000 applications from tillage farmers.
A change in the regulations has been made for those who had never filled in an Area Aid application before this year as they did not claim cattle premiums or aid for cereal growing.
These include 14,000 specialist dairy farmers and lowland sheep farmers who are not in the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS). In order to set up single payment entitlements for these farmers, the EU Commission has agreed that the lands they are farming in 2004 can be used for reference purposes for the Single Payments, which will total €1.3 billion.