Mr. Brian Rushe:

I thank the Chairman. The first question is whether I have any inside information in terms of the fertiliser market. Like many farmers, I bought fertiliser at the back end of the year and if I had that inside information, to put it quite simply I would not have bought any. Many farmers bought at the back end of last year. They bought it because they were fearful of supply. They played up with two risks in their head. The risk was that price could come back but the other risk was that they would not be able to get it. The decision many farmers made was that the risk of not getting it is a greater risk and they would secure it in their yards and have it anyway, in the knowledge that the soundings coming from the industry were that the price would not move much at all. That is where it was. The Deputy is quite right that when the war started, we had the big impact on import prices fairly quickly and farmers were fearful in terms of whether they would get it. They were not getting the product they wanted. This was farmers talking to themselves and even soundings coming from the sector as well. Farmers entered a market and secured what product they had because of the fear of not having it. There was, the committee will remember, the setting up of the fodder committee and even the tillage incentive scheme to try to secure feed.

If you look at what happened, however, by buying all that fertiliser farmers carried the risk for the sector. That is what happened there. The industry would not buy fertiliser and leave it sitting in yards and take the risk itself. It said to farmers or the noises came out to farmers that if they wanted to guarantee fertiliser for next year, they would have to buy it and take delivery. Farmers took the risk for the sector and now farmers are paying for that risk. Mr. Keane mentioned, and he is quite right, that in the interest of fairness, there should have been a burden-share around that because, to be clear, farmers are shouldering the complete burden of that now straight away.

The Deputy asked for an opinion about how much fertiliser was secured by farmers at the back end of the year. The answer to that is, I do not know only that, anecdotally, talking to other farmers, our members and even farmers in my discussion group, many farmers, particularly in the dairy sector and tillage sector, went out and secured a lot of fertiliser at the back end of last year. It has been sitting in yards and is only being used now. I am not sure of the statistics on what has been bought in the spring but I would imagine it is down quite a lot. It is only down because it was all bought at the back end of last year.

Deputy Fitzmaurice has a question in terms of the liming scheme and what sort of a budget would we think necessary. Not to put a figure on it, if you wanted a national liming scheme, it should be open to all farmers. It is my understanding now it is closed off to derogation farmers. It should not be closed off to derogation farmers. It should be open to all farmers. The money will not be massive. The Deputy quite rightly recognises where the State finds itself. To be honest, it should be open-ended because farmers will not spread. You could come away and limit it, as the Deputy said, to a 2-tonne per acre maximum because beyond that you are only doing harm, and backed up with soil samples and the most recent soil analysis. That would have been a simple way of doing it.

There is another couple of points there. I might pass on to Dr. Potterton and Mr. Kissane. I thank the Deputy for his question.