The highly anticipated low-cost loan scheme for farmers will be made available from the start of 2019, according to Agriland.
The online news publication cited the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, who was speaking to the Oireachtas Joint Committee for Agriculture, Food and the Marine yesterday.
There, he outlined details of the scheme, including the approval of long-term, unsecured loans for farmers of up to €500,000 over an eight to ten-year period, with minimum loans set to €50,000.
“The money we’ve secured will be paid over in terms of securing the availability of the fund – but the product won’t be in the market for draw-down until the start of the year,” the Minister told the Committee.
“The details of it are available now and we will work with the remaining steps that need to be taken to deliver it to the marketplace.”
Strategic Partners
The Minister revealed that his Department received €25 million in funding and is currently working with “a number of strategic partners” to deliver the final product.
“We’re talking about unsecured borrowing over a period of eight to ten years, both of which are not currently available at a competitive rate and what we are envisaging within those two parameters to have a product that would be available at less than 5%,” he said.
“There are so many moving parts in this latter scheme that we don’t control all the levers on it; if we did we probably would have a product in the marketplace already but we’re dealing with a number of partners including SBCI, European Investment fund, etc.”
He said this new initiative will be unlike its predecessor, which he claimed “leveraged” competition, however, he still claimed that last year’s loan scheme was a success.
© 2018 Checkout – your source for the latest Irish retail news. Article by Aidan O’Sullivan. Click subscribe to sign up for the Checkout print edition.
