Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising those points. She outlined them well. I am going to go to the officials, especially Dr. Corkery and Mr. Collins, to answer some of her specific questions on the percentage of prescriptions and the vets element.

Let me bring it back to the start. The process here and the reason we are doing this is to ensure we have the best possible health standards for our animals. As I have said previously, we are trying to strike the right balance between giving the greatest choice possible to farmers, meeting our regulatory requirements and ensuring the sustainability of our pasture-based livestock system, which is crucially important to rural Ireland and our rural economy. Many of the members present come from constituencies where it is so important. A threat is posed to the health of our animals by resistance to certain medicines upon which we are so dependent. That is the motivation behind these practices. Now it is about getting the elements for our own national competence into national legislation to try to apply them as best suits our country while complying with the regulatory requirement, as we need to do. It is a balance and a challenge. I do not profess that it is perfect or that the final solution will be perfect.

Any stakeholders in this who come with legal opinion believe there are ways around the legal challenges we all know exist and which members of the committee are aware of and have dealt with extensively in the previous report. We are actively analysing them to see if there is some way to try to apply those that would best suit our system. It is about getting that balance right, which is ultimately what we want to do, while also recognising that the motivation here is the longer term threat to the health of our livestock in a pasture-based system, which is so important to our rural economy. I will bring in Mr. Collins first on the percentage of prescriptions query and then I will bring in Mr. Corkery on the vets point.