Mr. Colm Forde:

In the current environment I do not think that could be facilitated. One of the things that came out of the TB stakeholder forum was that farm bodies had some concerns with the on-farm market valuation system. With their input we agreed terms of reference for an independent review of the system. That was carried out by Grant Thornton and was the subject of discussion at last week's finance group meeting with the forum members. We have a number of recommendations that we can work through. Grant Thornton's overall review basically said that the on-farm market valuation system, as it currently stands, is broadly a good model and that its recommendations are relative tweaks to it. One of the points a number of the farm bodies touched on earlier was the level of frustration about getting reactor cattle off the farm as quickly as possible. That is something we are very keen to work on. When Grant Thornton looked at this scheme it said that the cause of the significant delay is the fact that we have a live valuation. Someone physically goes out onto a farm, the farmer has a number of days to accept the recommendation and there is post over and back. If we really want to make progress on that, it would be through an automated valuation. We will talk through that with the farm organisations.