Ms Sinéad McPhillips:

It is very much a commodity market. In respect of the future, I come back to our twin main challenges which are climate change-Brexit and the baseline profitability of suckler farming. The question is whether people will persist in that occupation. When Ms Bruce and I analysed suckler farming ten or 15 years ago, we thought that when beef supports were decoupled from production there would be a massive decline in suckler numbers, but that never happened. There is obviously more at play that just economics and people persist with farming because they are wedded to it.