Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

Absolutely. The inspections are ongoing. It was critically important to keep these facilities open because without them there could have been food shortages. There certainly would have been a collapse in agricultural markets and the agricultural economy would have collapsed, so it was very important to keep them open. It was important also in those circumstances to protect the staff and the reputation of the Irish sector. These inspections are ongoing. In the context of testing, the latest figure I have is 86,541 tests completed in 88 food production facilities with 526 cases detected in all. At the last round of testing, which involved 11,000 swabs taken in 44 facilities, the positivity rate was 0.35%, which is something below the national positivity rate. The reality is that as long as there is infection in the community there is the possibility of this disease getting into meat plants. We know because of specific research that we have done that they are high-risk environments, particularly in the boning hall because they are temperature controlled. With temperature control comes a control over the input and output of air, so there is a potential for the virus to build up over the day if infection gets into the plants.