Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Mr. O'Gorman touched on the following point. The first interaction I ever had with ICOS was when I was in Brussels in 2014 and the problem then was price depression and a lot of these measures became much more popular as a result of trying to protect against volatility. The entire European milk strategy is based on the expectation that there will be periods of extreme volatility. The one area that has been spoken about ever since then is some mechanism of a rainy day fund so that the dairy sector does not end up in a situation like the one we were talking about in the pig sector earlier.

I know that ICOS has been an advocate of that type of fund. How do the witnesses see that working, considering that every time an emergency measure is utilised, it is always a dollar short and a day late? How do we ensure that such measures can be utilised quickly to address anomalies? This is an anomaly. Someone described it as like being in a fixed-term mortgage for a number of years and then interest rates collapsing and the homeowner being caught. Of course, the homeowner can get out of that mortgage and pay some sort of a penalty. They can get out of it. That option is not available for these people in this particular circumstance.