Mr. Christy Comerford:

I would like to ask one question. We are talking about putting dairy blood into the suckler herd. If someone went to a good dairyman's yard today and asked him to introduce a Belgian Blue bull into this herd and milk his daughters in his milking parlour in two years' time, he would tell him or her to get out of his yard. That cannot be done. It is like putting oil into water. Years ago in Scotland they bred the cattle down in size. They call them Belt Buckle cattle. They bred them small to hang them on the ships going to South America after the war. They came along and put those bulls on dairy cows to produce progeny from the dairy herd. English people died at 42 and 43 years of age from eating saturated beef from those animals. The queen gave a grant to put suckler cows back up on those hills. She introduced continental cattle in 1963. The first importation was of Charolais cattle followed by all the other beef breeds, including Limousin and Simmental. The animals from those, crossed on suckler herds, were a niche market. They were paid properly for that beef because it was top class. They could produce an animal that was fattened 48 days faster. That was back in 1963. Here we are with a scheme in this country driving the beef industry back 50 years at least. I am a suckler farmer and when the scheme was introduced, most of my neighbours could not join it because the Minister could introduce new regulations relating to the scheme at any stage. How could somebody take up a scheme when there could be new regulations put into it when the person had already joined it? It would be like buying a pig in a bag. The committee is talking about bringing animals from the dairy herd. Good suckler cows came from dairy cows but at the moment there is so much Jersey and Holstein blood in these dairy cows, they would not be capable of calving a decent beef calf. We would see more cruelty in this country. A mouse cannot have a rat. It is as simple as that.