Ms Kate Carmody:

I have applied to Enterprise Ireland. It said its policy is not to fund hemp and not to fund a co-operative, but CAP is changing next year so co-operatives can get funding. LEADER has been very resistant because it does not have the money and has now run out of money. We submitted a major EIP-AGRI project for the whole of Ireland to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. It was €1.2 million, which is not huge in the scale of things, but we were turned down flat. I was told by the Department that it will not fund hemp until it is in policy. I am asking the committee to take industrial hemp out of the Misuse of Drugs Act and put it into agriculture where it belongs.