Mr. T.J. Flanagan:

That would not be our remit at all. As Mr. O'Gorman was describing, at the instigation of these fixed-price contracts 11 years ago, when everybody was learning about these contracts, there was probably more demand than there was tonnage to be allowed. These are dynamic matching exercises and it takes in a customer who wants to take out volatility and a farmer who wants to do the same. The customer wants to pay as low a price as possible, meanwhile, and the farmer wants to get as high a price a possible. Over a period we might come to a sweet spot and we might think our customers or our farmers would be interested and they are matched. For a good number of years, people would have been taking up 10% on any particular scheme but some of them were three-year schemes. There could be 10% in one scheme, 10% in another and 10% in another. The run for the people who were in fixed-price schemes was probably in the order of a maximum of 30%.

Since quotas ended in 2015, we have had fairly substantial increases in milk supply and, critically, fairly substantial investment at individual farm levels. We have probably seen farmers who are more highly leveraged than would have been traditional in the dairy sector. We understand that substantial pressure was applied by the financial institutions on these farmers to maximise the amount of milk in fixed-price contracts. In response to demand from farmers driven by their financial institutions, co-operatives acceded to that.