Mr. Cormac Healy:

Certainly a proportion of processors, not across the board and it probably depended on various sectors, were in the temporary wage subsidy scheme.

I know that just from speaking to them. Individual companies participated in the temporary wage support scheme. Certainly, a number of companies in the processing sector did because they met the requirements and, as the chairman said earlier, one of the biggest issues, and in the beef sector it probably had the greatest impact because of its reliance on food services, was the overnight close-down of the food service sector and that market channel, which accounts for 30% of the beef exported from Ireland. That was gone overnight, effectively, as the virus swept across Europe and country after country brought in lockdown. That remains the case as far as food services are concerned. It was one of the biggest factors in production. Questions were asked earlier about production levels. On the beef side, production levels fell quite significantly in April and into early May. They have been recovering since, thankfully, but in April and into May there was certainly a significant reduction in throughput and processing activity on the beef side, principally because of the lack of that food service market channel, which accounted for 30% of output.