Mr. Bill Cashman:

I do not know what the future is going to bring but we have always managed up to this and I see no reason we will not manage, even with the financial constraints. As I said earlier, even during Covid, we were told we were to stay open, and we just did so and that was the end of it. The Minister announced that we were staying open and we just soldiered on. Of course, there are a lot of well-known pressures with regard to lifestyle and work-life balance in veterinary practice, although that is not on the agenda today. We have very high rates of mental health problems and very high suicide rates, although other people probably have the same types of pressures.

As I said, we have the same commercial imperatives that all small businesses have, and we are very small businesses. There are no outside supports, such as the supports for doctors, with almost €1 billion going to GPs for premises and so on, and the hospitality sector got the 9% VAT rate to make things easier in recent years. That does not happen for vets. We have never sought or been successful in getting any of those things. There are only about 3,000 vets in total in the country so we are not a very big constituency.

It has always been the case that you answer for what your client wants. Vets do the best they can for the patient and for the client, and they have to balance the two, given that sometimes the rights of the animal are not best served by the wants of the owner. Most of the time, we can work around that but it is a question of balancing it and trying to be as professional as we can be. Whether the person is able to afford the most expensive specialists or not, we can generally work our way around it.