Mr. John Enright:

I refer to the €11 million fund that was mentioned. We are firmly of the view that money can be paid as direct payments to dairy farmers. They are the regulations. Our proposal is that dairy farmers should get a payment of €1,200 each. We asked the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine whether that is legally possible under the regulation and the response we received was that it was.

From our reading of the regulation we are very clear that it is possible. There is one distinction compared to the payment that was made to dairy farmers last year, namely, that one must meet one condition. There are seven options, but a farmer must meet in order to qualify for the payment.

For example, one of the options would be that I took part in the voluntary reduction scheme. Others include that I did not increase my milk production, that I am a small-scale farmer, that I am engaged in extensive production methods or that I am in a quality assurance scheme. At this stage, there are 15,000 dairy farmers who are either in the quality assurance schemes or close to being in them, so we are very firmly of the view that this is possible. The Department confirmed to us that it is possible and we also spoke to the EU Commission on it. The Commission said it is entirely up to the member state to decide what it wants to do with it. We do not see any barrier, under the legal regulation, to allowing that to happen. This was a dairy package. It was negotiated as a dairy package and we feel it should be there to support the dairy farmer.

We accept Deputy Pringle's point regarding the multiple retailers and the fact there is no point putting pressure on the Irish multiple retailer, but the point we would make is that dairy farmers across Europe have seen their milk price fall by 35% to 40% in the last 12 months. At the same time the retail price of dairy products across Europe fell by 2%. Somewhere in between, somebody is getting an extra margin. As a starting point, we need to expose who is getting what in that chain. As an example of what can be done, recently on the beef side one multiple retailer in France has agreed to pay a price that will return a positive margin for the farmer. The French farmers are in a much different position to ourselves in that they have a home market that is much bigger than ours, but that has happened in the last two to three weeks. Pressure will have to be put on the multiple retailers to address the cut in the margin for the farmer.

On interest rates, it is possible under the CAP rural development plan, for example, if the Minister wants to do so, to use funds that are unused at present to set up financial instruments to help farmers. The crisis fund should be used for the crisis and we should look at the CAP rural development plan to deal with financial instruments to try to address the issue with the banks. To be fair to Glanbia and Dairygold, they have introduced low-interest loans for their suppliers and that model, along with some of the work that is being done by the SBCI, is an alternative. It does not make sense to use crisis funding to fund low-interest loans.

On Senator Lombard's point regarding the beef forum, the key issue from our perspective is that if there are more cattle in the system, there will have to be more alternative markets for farmers. The live export trade is critical from that perspective. We have a live export trade for calves and weanlings but the finished cattle element is very important from our perspective. If that could be secured, it would go a long way to addressing the issues in that respect. Much work has been done on the US market for ground beef, as our president has mentioned, and the Chinese market, but we need to see beef moving to those markets. I think we have answered most of the questions.