Mr. Cormac Cunningham:

We do. We carry out a quality assurance audit on our farmers. There are minimum standards within the EU and they are rather high. The same minimum standards apply to liquid milk. If one were to go to a manufacturing milk farmer one would find in the majority of cases that the set-up is just as good and the standards are just as high. Do we insist on the same high standards of manufacturing farmers? Of course we do. The milk those farmers get to us cannot be shoddy in any way. We cannot accept that claim. Given the shelf-life we put on our product, we have to get high-quality milk. If there was any differentiation between the quality of the milk been produced by manufacturing milk farmers in the South, obviously we would not want to use it, but there is no difference.

This relates to the question from Deputy Barry about liquid milk farmers and how they are very concerned about liquid milk and all the supposedly cheap liquid milk coming from the North that is affecting their market. I have pointed out that already, a significant number of them are being paid the full liquid premium, which I am perfectly happy about and I do not have a problem with that. However, the milk is not being used for liquid at all. The idea that there could be a scarcity of milk makes no sense when the country is awash with the stuff. There is loads of milk that can be used for liquid. Will there be a scarcity in the winter months? If they want to pay a liquid premium to the manufacturers farmers, they will have more milk than they will know what to do with. Even if they do not, the milk is still here and it is of the right quality. It is available and it can be used to go into any market anywhere in the EU.

There were a number of questions about herd size. Was the first question about how much we pay?