Having spoken to many farmers, there is deep scepticism about the Department of agriculture's capacity to deliver timely payments under the Government's €100 million fuel subsidy support scheme for farmers, agricultural contractors and fishermen and fisherwomen. The reason there is scepticism is that there were significant delays in payments under the agri-climate rural environment scheme, ACRES, which left many farm families waiting months. I have seen one family left waiting a number of years for an ACRES payment. Obviously, this money was promised and they had budgeted for it. It was not an isolated incident. Farmers have had long experience, unfortunately, of the Department announcing schemes with great fanfare only for there to then be delays and chaos. Will the Taoiseach confirm that additional staff will be allocated to the Department of agriculture to ensure that these payments will be made in a timely manner?

There had been issues with the administration of ACRES, which is a €1.5 billion scheme. By the way, a lot of the funding from this Government for ACRES comes from the carbon tax. It is 60% funded by the Government and 40% by the European Union Common Agricultural Policy.

I would take the Deputy's point. The Minister is doing everything he can to improve and enhance the administrative capacity of ACRES. The scheme that is announced is an important scheme of €100 million in value. There has to be a degree of working out of that both in terms of farmers, usage of fuel - some categories of farming have a higher usage of fuel than others - and then the farm contractors as well. We are fully aware of the need to have a seamless and a proper delivery system in place.