Mr. Trevor Donnellan:

I am going to express a personal view. What the Deputy is suggesting is quite prescriptive. I may be taking a wrong interpretation, but it sounds to me as though the Deputy is suggesting that we effectively determine what happens in different parts of the county. I think what would be more effective and more realistic is to work with the circumstances as they exist. We have a situation where agriculture is driven by market forces to some degree and by policy forces to some degree. When I say policy, I mean agriculture supports provided for by Brussels. That is the framework from which we must begin in terms of looking at what can be achieved in the future. I cannot think of any instance in a western country where people are going down to the level of detail of prescribing what type of activity should happen in a particular hectare of land. I do not know if that is a realistic objective. We need to bear in mind that there are 140,000 farmers in the country. It is a different process from looking at what six factories might be doing. The heterogeneity that exists in terms of agriculture is critically important as well. I think we would be much better off to focus on measures that farmers would be more willing to buy into, that is, things that farmers understood as opposed to being very highly prescriptive in terms of telling farmers that they are doing X and they should now be doing Y.