Mr. Cormac Healy:

One retailer was mentioned towards the latter part of the conversation on retail price and maybe it is worth the committee having a look at it. The committee has been looking at Food Wise 2025. Between 2015 and 2018, the consumer price index for food and beverages in Ireland fell by 7.5%. The CSO has those figures. It is worth looking at that because it ties in with what Deputy Scanlon said about pressure in the market.

The industry does not set the price of cuts. Beef is one of the loss leaders in retail. There is serious competition between discounters and other retailers that is putting pressure on the returns achievable, certainly in the context of what the Chairman said about the climate change challenge and the increased costs and challenges facing us. To then face into an environment where there is effectively below-cost selling cannot be tolerated.

I will speak to the myriad questions and comments members posed and made. The industry has published a desired market specification which was asked for by the stakeholders, the Department and Bord Bia. It was published a number of years ago and holds true. We should send it to the committee because it was published. Its aim was to provide guidance on what is required from the market by the vast majority of customers. A point was made about international markets looking for animals that are less than 30 months old and only represent 5%. If I want to send 1 oz or 1 kg of an animal to China, it must be under 30 months. That is the reality. Unfortunately it is not a case where, if an animal is under 30 months, it can go in its entirety to China unlike one that cannot. If 1 oz of a particular animal is being taken, that will be what we are faced with.

I will make a point about Irish beef, marketing, grass-fed animals and various other matters. Efforts are ongoing to explore PGI status for Irish beef. The specific description or designation of that at EU level has to be worked out and the Department is leading that process but it has been engaged with farm organisations, Bord Bia and ourselves. That should be achieved and would provide a designation of what truly makes Irish beef stand out but I do not know if that will apply to suckler herds or not.

Bord Bia is carrying out research on what it could do to market or build specifically around the marketing of suckler meat. Let us be clear that the consumer does not really get suckler meat. That is absolutely not anything against suckler, quite the contrary, but they do not get that particular aspect of it. Consumers get breed, grass-fed, origin and those kinds of things. Bord Bia is doing work on that and is looking at how it would be developed, designed and pitched to the market and whether additional EU funding could go in to support that. That is information for the committee.