Mr. Gerry Neary:

I will go back to a point that was made by the previous speaker, who asked how it will affect existing practices if corporates develop in a large way. The corporates are cherry-picking the really good practices in the dense area of small animal treatment. I assure the committee that they will be moving into the dense large animal areas next. By the time we get to them, they will have picked up a considerable amount of the lucrative practices and clients.

The other aspect of the matter is that these corporates are paying six to 14 times more for practices than was heretofore the cost when practices were traded among professionals themselves. What does that do to the future and to the young vets of the profession? As Deputy Cahill alluded to earlier, those young vets will work for the rest of their lives for €25,000 to €40,000 a year while their peers in factories and working in Supermacs are earning more money than them. That is only going to lead to an exodus from the profession. That is the reality. As Deputy Cahill also pointed out, there is absolutely no career progression whatsoever. There is no way out of that. Those young vets will never have enough money to access a mortgage for a house. There will not be a practice left for them to buy or, if there is, it will be uneconomical because all the economical ones will have been bought by corporates. That is the point I would make to the previous speaker's comments.

In response to Deputy Michael Collins, we have no wish to take veterinary services away from the veterinary model, of which I am very proud, towards the medical model, which is regional. I have travelled over and back to England on a regular basis and I have experienced the regionality of large animal practice in the United States. The vets there are covering areas of 80 to 100 miles and can only guarantee they will get to a case within three hours. If you pull a calf from a cow, rupture an artery and are left holding it with your fingers for three hours waiting for a vet, your cow will die. That is an animal welfare issue.

I operated all my life as a single-man practice. I had a list of six vets around me to whom I could pick up the phone if I was in the factory or was on a new job and could not get to another job. One of those vets would turn up instead. There is tremendous solidarity between vets because it is a difficult life. We do not want to see our veterinary service going from local to regional. I would be all for the amalgamation and organisation of night services on a local town basis, within a radius of, say, 20 km.

We would not want the out-of-hours service to be regionalised to the extent taking place in medicine, where someone has to be triaged by a nurse for two or three hours before he or she even hears that he or she will get a doctor. The previous speaker made a very valid point when he asked why we interfered with a service that was so good prior to December 2017. Why did we practically take apart something that was so good? We have a tremendous veterinary service in this country. You could not ask for a better service. We have always provided a service in an emergency within half an hour. I do not know why we are trying to undo all that. It is being done with no political interference to stop it happening. This is why we are pretty alarmed about what is happening.