Professor Gerry Boyle:

I promised to provide it a number of months ago when this issue was raised. I want to address those issues now. We have several demonstration farms, the whole point of which is that one learns as much from the bad outcomes as the good ones. It was in that spirit that we commissioned a report, alongside Greenfield farm. We wanted to have experts look at this episode, so we asked Mr. Tom Moran, the former Secretary General, to chair the investigation. We hired an international expert in the field of animal welfare under extreme conditions from the United States, and a number of other eminent people. We also had one person from our board, who is a diary farmer. The Deputy said that we cannot bury the findings of this report. Teagasc has no intention of burying any findings. I would like to think that this report provides a very candid account in which no punches are pulled in the context of the Greenfield episode. It is a wake-up call for us, and is also a wake-up call for farmers in the context of climate change. Colleagues who know more about the science of these things than I would say that we cannot point to the past year as evidence of climate change, but for the lay person and the average farmer it was. The episode was unprecedented. It was certainly the case that none of the people working on the farm on a day-to-day basis had any experience of events like that ever occurring in their lifetimes. The lesson for me concerned adaptation. We have to have really robust training programmes in place. I am an ex officiomember of the Climate Change Advisory Council, and I have been making the point that we have to simulate these conditions. That comes across in the report, but from talking to the people involved it is clear that it was a frightening experience.

Teagasc is not a shareholder in Greenfield farm. We provide top-level managerial advice, and the farm manager reports to the so-called Moorepark officer on the ground. We are clearly not standing back from our responsibilities in terms of what is identified in the report. From my point of view there are three things to be actions. The governance structure lacks clarity, as became clear after the fact. Things were going very well, and many young farmers set up farms following the model who would not have been able to set up farms otherwise. When I called for this report I was asked to meet approximately 30 of them from all over the country. Only one of those people was over the age of 35. They were a fantastic bunch of individuals who were able to start up their business because of the blueprint provided at Greenfield. They stuck at it. The difference between those farmers and Greenfield was that as they started to make a surplus they began to invest in their facilities a bit more.

There was a dynamic component to what they were doing. From that perspective, that element was a success. The Deputy is 100% correct, however. We are not going to hide anything here. There are lessons associated with governance, and clarification is required. We have already actioned that. It is going to happen.

An inexcusable issue arose in the context of the health and safety statements and an arrangement needed to be put in place. That has obviously happened after the fact. Issues arose that will be outside our control but we will certainly be advising the board of the farm to examine the facilities. The facilities identified in the report to be of most concern were those for the calving house.

On animal fatalities, two cows and four calves died immediately due to the adverse circumstances, and two others died shortly thereafter. We are saying two cows and six calves comprised the total. That is not acceptable. Obviously, no animal death is acceptable. In fairness, this must be considered against the background of a fairly good animal health and mortality record on the farm. That is documented in the report. The farm, unlike many private farms, is under the public gaze. We have learned an awful lot from that. I take the Deputy's point that if there is no improvement, I expect to be back here answering the legitimate questions raised.