Mr. Peter Collins:

The Deputy is right that we have taken on a huge and onerous task. We have looked at different options but the main objective is to keep a competitive market and provide farmers with a greater choice as to where they get medicines. Obviously we want to collect the information in one go so that we can report to the EU on that basis. There are a number of reasons for introducing the system. Building it and getting contractors on board has been a challenge. The contractors have been in since March and we have been doing a lot of the business requirements and the collection of information since then as well as prior to that. There has been a lot of development and movement on the system in the last four or five months. A considerable amount of work has been done on the back end systems to put this all together.

We have had a number of stakeholder engagements. I am not sure from where the Deputy heard that the Department is way behind. We have heard a couple of those rumours and we are not sure from where people got that information. We have spoken to vets, licensed merchants, feed mills, dispensers, pharmacy companies and pharmacy software companies. All of those people are involved in the whole spectrum of prescribing and dispensing everywhere. We have put all of those together.

We have done an awful lot of designing and development at this stage. We have done some focus groups. We hope to have a few more focus groups in the next couple of weeks. Starting in November, we hope to have what we call user acceptance testing. At that time we will do some internal tests across the Department and then we will extend the testing to the dispensers and vets to see how they can see the system.

At the moment we are still on track and on time in terms of what we are trying to deliver. There are elements to system in terms of what we can deliver and what people call the minimal viable product. It will not have bells and whistles hanging off it and it will not be the most fantastic system one will see in the world. It will be functional and will do exactly what we hope it will do which is to allow people to write prescriptions and for people to dispense medicines from those prescriptions.

The system will probably not go live on 28 January because it is a Friday. I imagine that we will go live on the following Monday, 31 January. We are considering introducing a soft approach to go live, which is a transition phase that will be allow the continuation of paper prescriptions for people who may not be technically astute or where we have not got around to fully training people in the timeframe that remains. We will not directly cut people from using paper prescriptions, which have been used for the last 30, 40 and 50 years. We will slowly introduce the system. The system will be introduced and available for everybody to use, who wants to use it, on 31 January.