Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat. I thank the witnesses for their presentations, and I want to acknowledge the really good work done by the Beef Plan Movement, because I think it gets to the crux of the problems here. In one sense, it should be the interaction between the two groups. I have a few short questions. Who made up the four movement rule? Can somebody explain to me how, if an animal is moved four times, scientifically we come to the conclusion that it is of lesser worth than one that has moved two or three times? What is the scientific evidence behind it? It was said that there are 35 processing factories, but how many owners are we talking about? Do we have some owners that have multiple facilities?

Around the transparency, the price the processor gets for beef, and the weekly reports, can the witnesses give me a breakdown of how much the processors get as opposed to how much the farm enterprise gets? In relation to the proposal by the Beef Plan Movement of having a farm representative on the factory floor at all times, that would seem like a really good idea to me that would introduce some transparency and fairness into the system. Would the witnesses agree with that, or would they see any problems with such a move in that area? I will confine my questions to those because that is what I am trying to get to.

What data do the factories have from the industry in order to be able to do the prices? I will not say fix the prices, but what data do they have in order to come to the prices they come to? Why do we not have data in the way we do for milk? We talked earlier about having a European audit. Do the witnesses think the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine should release the data available to it and give it to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, so we can take this idea that things are not as transparent as we might need them to be in order to have a beef industry that is worth €2.4 billion or €2.6 billion and that could be distributed in a fairer way off the table once and for all? I thank the Chairman.