Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is the point I am trying to make. I would know Connemara a bit better than I know Mayo. If I go to Tourmakeady, which is in south Mayo on the border, they have always been able to produce them. The further north one goes, the more they can get the French weight because they have a lot of good lowland and they have kinder hills. If I go to Joyce country, to places like Glantrague and to the Maam Valley, they begin to get smaller but when I go up to Recess, they get even smaller still. The same would be the case for the Twelve Bens. If I go to Roundstone or Oughterard, I am back into good-size lambs again. It is the many lambs in the middle that are causing the problem, not the ones around the edge. I would say the same thing happens in Donegal in that on what we call the kinder hills and where there is a better proportion of lowland. They can crossbreed and do all sorts of things and get them on the market near the French weight or at a weight that makes it no problem for the upper Italian market and so on.

It is the core blackface. Putting a soft sheep on a hard mountain is something so many people have tried to do. Michael O'Toole, God rest his soul, was an expert on this for years. He was a soil scientist and worked for Teagasc but he was also a hill sheep farmer from Inishturk. He was my mentor and we often discussed this problem over the years. It is not so easy to make what Mr. Fennell is talking about out of the hills I am talking about. These people cannot get the price and in many years find it is very hard to sell wether lambs. They have no problems with ewe lambs as they will crossbreed those into other flocks. It has been a perennial problem since I started in 1974. We are now in 2015, so it has been going on 41 years and no one has found a sustainable solution.

It is a question of getting the market to suit the product as well as the product to suit the market because it is impossible to produce the kind of product that Mr. Fennell is talking about on some of these hills.