Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to go back to the Twenty20 Beef Club for a minute. Major concerns are being raised by individuals with us regarding inputs. Glanbia, as Mr. O'Leary correctly said, is a large company with a strong reputation. It is unusual that it still feels it necessary to force the participants in the scheme to buy all their inputs from it. There are many other co-operative and private merchants, most of them of a far smaller scale, that, in the view of the merchants who have presented to us, have been very much put at a competitive disadvantage. While this is probably beyond the CCPC's remit, Glanbia has a mechanism whereby it gives co-operatives bonuses at the end to redistribute its profits. Private merchants are making the case to us that they are small businesses and are finding it hard to compete with this big corporate beside them that has various mechanisms of trying to disguise the price it is paying, and here it is now forcing its customers into a scheme and tying them into it for a period. Anyone who goes into it for six months forgoes all the advantages of coming out of it. It is not the end price that is the be-all and end-all of this scheme; it is the fact that the inputs are being completely controlled by a large player.