Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I know there are the big processors. I will put it this way. In Ireland at the moment, if a farmer wanted to do organic milk we do not have the drying facility. Would that not be fair to say? Have the witnesses looked at that? Germany is supposed to be a fairly good market for organic stuff. Have they gone to any of the processors and said they will support the infrastructure for the drying because there is fair money involved? It is no more so than when Dublin started it was a small city and it is a big city now. It is the same with organic milk because we would have spoken to some of the processors. With sheep or goats you can go to the big processor and they will give you the usual average price and then there are people who specialise in it, who would be small businesses. They might not have ten or 11 workers but they give a good price to the farmer and they are not up there yet.

The LEOs were mentioned, but it is pittance money that people will get that way if they are trying to export their stuff. What is this rule of, ideally, having ten employees? Let us take the case of someone having got an idea one day, started off doing something in a shed and then built it up and perhaps got to the stage of employing 1,000 people. I went off to observe a company once; the people involved had a jeep, a few shovels and some other bits. Now, they have 1,000 workers employed.