Mr. John Enright:

Yes but to be fair, people give the impression that we have very poor water quality here in Ireland. If you compare us with the quality across Europe, we have a very good quality of water. We accept we have challenges but look at it from a dairy farmer's perspective. The agri-climate rural environment, ACRE, scheme was introduced recently. It is absolutely irrelevant to assisting those family dairy farms. People can criticise dairy farmers and they can criticise farmers in general but they are not getting the required supports. The ACRES would be an opportunity to help farmers along that line but it is not being supported and they are being completely excluded from that scheme. We have an agricultural sustainability support and advisory programme, ASSAP, scheme in which farmers have voluntarily participated. They have gone to meetings and listened to our advisers, and that scheme is shown to work. Our concern here is we are putting regulation on top of regulation on top of regulation. We are not giving the regulations time to work. What we are doing is absolutely hammering family dairy farms. People have the impression, as our president said, these are all large farms but they are not. A lot of these farmers have 50, 60 or 70 cows and we are going to put these people out of business with the direction we are going in. We are giving them no support whatsoever.