Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The one problem I have is that one report was done on specifications and, whether we like to believe it or not, we have gone to the wrong people. In fairness, some people outside the country co-operated with Grant Thornton. However, on the value of an animal, the fact is there are now people around the world who are looking for many parts of an animal, including gallstones. We talked about the fifth quarter, offal and all the different parts but we have no genuine figure for what an animal is worth. We do not know, even though we have gone through three reports because we could not get co-operation. In my view, that report is not finished.

The officials talked about specifications. The person who actually does the survey should be in the shop or outside the door or wherever, in the same way surveys are done to see who votes for whom. Until we do that we are going nowhere because, as has been pointed by Deputy Carthy and others, nothing is written down stating that a certain animal was 36 months old and it was moved five times. At the moment, and I am reiterating this, you can get top dollar for any animal, no matter what it is, because of supply and demand. I am concerned that we have two reports from Grant Thornton that do not seem to be finalised because it said it could not get the information for one and the second, in my view, did not include the people it needed to. If I was sent to Dublin in a lorry to collect 100 cattle and I came home with 70 or 80, there would be queer looking. Grant Thornton should finish compiling those reports in a different way.

Any information can be found out nowadays. It is easy to look at the price of products on the shelf. I will give a very simple analogy. If I am selling to five different companies in five different countries, I know who they are. They are well known and their products are on the shelf. We can walk along the shelf, look at the price of the stuff and see how much it is per kilo. Did the factories give all the information about what they are getting for what they are exporting from Ireland? Would it be fair to say you would not need to be mathematician to find that out? Did the Department get information from factories in Ireland about what they get from retailers in the different countries they are selling to?