Mr. Peter Collins:

I can come back to the Deputy immediately on that. There is no charge for anybody to use the system. It is part of the regulatory requirement by the EU for all member states to supply information on antimicrobial usage and sales. The EMA has provided advice to the European Commission that it will accept prescription information as usage data, even though not all prescriptions may be filled. The EMA is accepting usage data under Article 57, however. The Department previously made attempts to try to collect information regarding usage. It has been a huge resource burden and effort to try to get that information in the porcine sector in the past few years. Trying to get that information has been quite complex. The introduction of the new NVPS is seen as an immediate way to collect that information, with a minimal cost compared with what we would need to do if we tried to collect it from all the different sectors on the various species. We would need to collect that information from, whereas people entering the information directly on a prescription system gives it to us at the push of a button.