Mr. Richard Nolan:

There is one final point I want to emphasise. While the committee will want to focus on the bigger picture, there are many smaller pictures also. Members have no idea how fantastical and farcical is the environment in which retailers operate at times, given all of the legislation in place, the inspections that take place and the other regulations Ms Buckley can eloquently discuss. I will give a very recent example. Although the horsemeat issue is foremost at present, a Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine inspector came to my premises a number of weeks ago to check the residual toxins in fruit and vegetables and one of the items he wanted to check was a bottle of wine. I have no idea why somebody from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine should have been checking the level of residual toxins on the grapes used in wine when somebody was mislabelling beef in a boning hall somewhere in the country. It is both fantastical and farcical in some cases.