According to the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers' Association (ICSA), 8,300 farmers availing of the Beef Exceptional Aid Measure (BEAM) will be penalised for failing to meet the scheme's 5% nitrogen reduction target by the end of this year.

This, the association says, will lead to farmers paying penalties of around €14.5 million next spring and has led to the ICSA calling for "every aspect of the "flawed" scheme to be reviewed".

In February this year, the European Commission - based on a request from agriculture minister, Charlie McConalogue - allowed Ireland greater flexibility to set a new reduction period under BEAM.

It gave farmers the choice of changing the reduction year from the July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021 to a new period of January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2021.

Approximately 10,500 availed of the opportunity to defer to the new period, but now it appears that more than 8,000 will not make the new deadline.

According to ICSA beef chair, Edmund Graham, the conditionality attached to BEAM is "so flawed" that the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) must review it fully.

"It should have been distributed quickly and painlessly to those who needed it most."

"Those farmers are now approaching their December 31 deadline for achieving this. However, figures from the DAFM indicate that 8,300 of these farmers are set to miss the target.

"This means that these 8,300 farmers face having to repay some or all of this exceptional aid in the new year.”

“Farmers accept that conditionality is part and parcel of most schemes, in that you must meet certain requirements to get paid. That is fair enough, but aid money given to farmers in response to a crisis should never have been weighed down with conditionality that that was so cumbersome and difficult to achieve – mainly down to delays in getting accurate figures from the DAFM.”

“It must also be remembered that BEAM was looked for and secured in 2019, but the timeframe to meet the targets coincided with the arrival of a global pandemic," he said.

“Already we have had BEAM money taken back from farmers who did not opt to defer and were unable to meet the target, and now the prospect of adding another 8,000 farmers to their number is looming.

“So, we are looking at a situation where a scheme that was originally meant to deliver exceptional aid of €100 million, may actually end up delivering barely more than half the original target. By any key performance indicator, this is a disastrous outcome when the original objective was to deliver €100 million in badly needed aid to beef farmers.”

He said it is incumbent on the DAFM to review BEAM in its entirety.