Mr. Conor Mulvihill:

I thank Mr. Lavelle. I will try not to delay because everything that Mr. Lavelle said applies to the dairy industry, North and South, on the island. I will share my time with Dr. Michael Johnson at the end.

On the scale of the Irish dairy industry, it is a €15 billion all-island industry with €6.5 billion of exports. That underpins jobs across every parish on the island. The Northern Ireland protocol has saved that, let us be blunt about that. However, there are tweaks to the Northern Ireland protocol, as Mr. Lavelle has outlined, that can help it. Milk is a fungible product - I did not know that word until two years ago. For example, if 1l of milk comes down from the North to be processed in the South, it gets mixed all over the place. It is made into butter, into cheese and, way beyond that, it goes into infant formulas, specialised nutrition and foods for special medical purposes. People who are on ventilators as we speak are having all-island dairy products, not just in Ireland, but across the world. Irish cream liqueur, where whiskey and dairy actually meet, is an all-island product with milk from all around the place. There are 1 billion l of milk coming from North to South alone, that in turn goes into products with about 4 billion l of equivalent of milk. A huge proportion of our milk therefore is of a mixed nature and, on Mr. Lavelle’s point, loses its originating status. The Northern Ireland protocol protects that on the island of Ireland, on the island of Britain, and in the EU, but it does not protect the export of those products to where the EU has existing free trade agreements, FTAs. Those members who follow this - and I know Senator Lombard in particular has been very strong on this - know Irish dairy is actually a rest-of-world product. Those FTAs are, therefore, integral to the continued support and success of dairy farmers, North and South. This is an anomaly that the EU can fix, with political will. I will hand over to my colleague, Dr. Johnson, to bring a Northern view.