Mr. Pat McCormack:

I thank the Chair. I will go back to sport. If you hear everybody giving out about the referee on a Monday morning, you know that it certainly has not worked, and you know that the referee flashing a yellow card, a red card or a black card is not the way to go. In hurling Fergal Horgan, who refereed the all-Ireland, is regarded as one of the best referees out there, and he does not flash cards. He tries to work with the players and to talk to them on the field. I am relating that to the ASSAP, which I outlined earlier and which involves co-operation and working together to try to improve things. If you look at the water quality trends, the areas where the ASSAP took place and which were fully functional were the areas where we have seen the greatest improvement.

The Senator is quite right about sustainability. Economic sustainability will drive social sustainability because the people will stay in the area and they will be in a position to invest, and invest prudently from an environmental perspective. That has been proven down through the years, with the level of investment that has occurred on farms, albeit with the aid of various schemes, including the farm waste management and the targeted agriculture modernisation scheme, TAMS.

There is a huge aspiration driving the nitrates programme and that aspiration comes from the consumer, the general public, who expects standards to be raised. We have young children and we want to see a great environment for them in the years ahead. The reality of it is that economically it is not sustainable for us into the future, unless we see a degree of food price inflation. I started farming 20 years ago and it is hard to believe that in 1995, when I was a leaving certificate student, my father got as much for his milk in that year as I receive today, and this is considered a reasonably good year from a milk price perspective.

In the very same way we have seen this from a beef farming perspective. Ultimately, the primary producer has been forced to do more, to have more and to become as efficient as possible for an ever-decreasing margin, to the point where margins are virtually eroded.

Chairman, I am not telling you your business. Some other day I would love to have that discussion because it is a discussion that we certainly need to have if we are to deliver economic sustainability for agriculture going forward. Farmers have delivered on the various requests that were made in the past but, as I mentioned earlier, rather than further bureaucracy or further demands put on farmers that there is an educational drive and an awareness campaign, because we need to be coherent in terms of the various regulations that exist at the moment. I believe we will see a significant improvement in water quality with the aid of a nationwide ASSAP as well. If we saw the trend improve year-on-year we would be in a far better place to have an educated and a good debate.

However, without a significant move in the price that the farmer gets for his or her product going forward, all will be challenged over the coming decade.