Mr. Tomás Bourke:

That is perfect. I thank the Deputy. It falls in and I might just pick the specific compensation questions first. On the pedigree cattle, the Deputy is clearly referring to the ceilings within the scheme, which are not appropriate. It is supposed to be an on-farm market valuation scheme. As a farmer, if your animal goes down as a TB reactor you are entitled to get through that scheme the value you would reasonably expect the animal to get on the open market. As the Deputy and I both know, the current ceilings were not even covering some of the commercial cattle sold in marts in his own county and indeed across the country. That is under review under the live valuation scheme. There was a Grant Thornton review of that. It is one of the areas where changes have been sought. Discussions are ongoing to agree that through the financial working group dealing specifically with the live valuation scheme.

The key issue there is maintaining the independence of the valuers. The system has become way too prohibitive and constrained. It is effectively a box-ticking exercise with qualified auctioneers and valuers being paid to go out and write down tag numbers. We are looking for simplification of this system. These people are approved by the Department having undergone a tender process, are then trained by the Department, have auctioneering qualifications and are selling cattle four or five days a week in the marketplace. We do not need a 40-page booklet telling them which box to push the weanling into and which box to push the cow into. A simplification of the live valuation scheme is being sought. Let these experienced people go out and assess the animal based on their knowledge of the market. Take away all the bureaucracy around it. We referenced earlier all the money being wasted sending Department AOs around to sit in marts. They sit in the very mart the independent valuer is an auctioneer in to write on a page to send to Dublin, to send back down to the man who sold the bullock, the price he should give for a similar bullock when he goes out to a farmer's yard. Going back to the Deputy's other point about whether the money is being used correctly and efficiently, it certainly is not and there is another example. With the controls that are there we as farmers are not being allowed to get the correct value of our animal because that valuer is being hamstrung by bureaucracy and conditions around it. We are seeking that the ceilings be changed and that is under discussion. It applies to all animals because it has not been just a pedigree issue, as the Deputy is aware. Some high-quality springing heifers made well in excess of the €3,000 ceiling that is there.

The Deputy is 100% right on the information the farmer gets when he is asked to accept or reject a valuation. This is an issue we raised with the Department again last week. It is not only on the second valuation. On the first valuation the farmer is being asked to sign a V8 form but there is no actual value of the animals in the V8 form. He is given a valuation sheet that might have nine or ten animals on it, such as within calf, not in calf and various prices. There is no total. Then he is asked to sign a V8 form asking whether he accepts the first valuation. But what is the first valuation? This is the substantive point we have made. The Deputy is right. The farmer must be given full sight of the price on offer to him. We accept there may be variables. If the pregnancy status of the cow has a big bearing on the value, we can say it is either-or or put that caveat in but it certainly cannot and should not continue with a blank sheet because you do not know where you are going. Then you have the arbitration process, as the Deputy rightly identified.

On the hardship grant moneys, any farmer with enough farm income is not eligible for them. That is one of the problems. The biggest problem with the hardship grant moneys is the actual rate of pay. It is a maximum payment of €350 a month. While it is better than nothing, it certainly does not reflect the additional costs of maintaining 20, 30 or 40 weanlings if you are a suckler farmer who is set up to sell them in the back end of the year. Equally, from a dairy farmer's perspective as referenced by Deputy Danny Healy-Rae referenced earlier, the €250 does not go any way towards the cost of maintaining those 50 or 60 calves in February, March and April. We have sought fundamental changes to that which the committee will have seen from previous submissions. It is very easy to cost this and quantify it. If you are forced to maintain animals you ordinarily resold because of a TB restriction, your AIM system will show if you sold them last year and now you are forced to keep them. Teagasc has all the costs of maintaining these animals. These schemes need to be built on those real-time costs to offset the impact on the farm.

On the control of deer, it must be national. There was good work, or some good work, done by the original deer management forum. In Wicklow, two or three pilot areas were set up to see how you could address this within hotspot areas, that is, areas where studies found 16% of the deer had TB. The message here is it is a multi-stakeholder approach but somebody must be in charge and be responsible. Our view is that should be the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine because it is responsible for TB and the biggest and most identifiable threat deer are causing at the moment is TB. They-----