Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Before Dr. Smyth comes in, could I put the specific question to him? The backbone of the horse industry are local breeders the length and breadth of this country. They are the people who provide the benefit to our local economy and to our rural communities. They are the people who are the bedrock of the outstanding successes we have seen in the Grand National and elsewhere, yet they are telling us that the funding, almost €100 million this year, does not make it to them and does not give them the type of support they want because it is distributed through a prize money mechanism that invariably supports a very small number of the top breeders. Good luck to them, but the difficulty is that we are not getting an economic return to the degree that we could. Does the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, which actually allocates this money, have any view whatsoever as to whether or not this is the best way of spending this substantial Exchequer investment?