Mr. Joe Healy:

I will hand over to my colleagues in a few minutes. On the CAP, we referred to the stacking of entitlements. I came across quite a few farmers this year who would gladly give up land based on the few bad years they had. I came across one of them in Deputy Cahill's county of Tipperary. A dairy farmer outbid him for the land that was near him and he had to take land 30 miles away. That added extra costs and he would gladly have stacked his entitlements on the acres and sown a lot less.

Last year, we invited the Minister to a council meeting to launch an-all Irish grain formulation made up of wheat, oats, barley and beans. We ran a few campaigns. One of the campaigns was to try to include that as an option for farmers when they go to their local merchant or mill. We also had a very strong campaign on increasing the percentage of Irish grain in the rations. We took samples from two boatloads last year, one in Foynes and the other in Drogheda, and they showed the imported grain to be of inferior quality to what we have here. Mr. Dunne and Mr. Conway were centrally involved. Another concern was the presence of the two weeds I mentioned earlier which are detrimental to the Irish crop, namely, the sterile brome and the black grass. That is something on which we will need to keep a close eye.

My final point relates to malt and barley. There is potential in these areas and the IFA has been pushing hard for them since 2009. There was a market for 60,000 tonnes in 2009 and the combined work of the IFA and Boortmalt has today grown that to 140,000 tonnes. That is an increase of well over 100%, with the target to go to 200,000 tonnes in the not-too-distant future. Deputy Martin Kenny mentioned the potential for malting and that is very much the case. I will now hand over to Mr. Dunne or Mr. Conway to go into some of the specifics in more detail.