Ms Paula Barry Walsh:

I will give an overarching view of that and my colleagues can come in with more detail, as appropriate. As we mentioned, the antiparasitic stakeholder group was put together last year.

Every one of those stakeholders has a vested interest in and a particular perspective on antiparasitic resistance. Together, chaired by the Department and provided with secretarial assistance by the Department, they drew up 30 different actions under the six different headings. I will go through them briefly.

First, we want to improve the knowledge and awareness of antiparasitic resistance. That is an important message. What we know that not every farmer or licensed merchant, LM, in the country knows. It is a growing problem. On improving knowledge and awareness, the stakeholders have websites, training and personnel who are interested. We need to reach out, with our stakeholders, to those people and improve our own knowledge and awareness all round.

Second, we are enhancing the surveillance of antiparasitic resistance and usage. We believe electronic prescription gives a real opportunity for the stability of the LMs. It also gives us much data so that we can watch these things and can try to determine what is happening. We can see where the trends are going, what is being prescribed and, as mentioned, whether it is less or more.

We also want to reduce the spread of infection-----