Mr. Ray Doyle:

I thank the Senator. I will cut to the chase as we are under time pressure. The NVPS, if it was working correctly, probably should have been in excess of 20 million prescriptions a year. Within a year to date, by the end of April, only 75,000 prescriptions were uploaded onto it. Of that, 99.8% were dispensed by the vet who wrote the prescription, even though there is very little uptake with the NVPS. Therein is our point illustrated. The vet who provides a prescription will more than likely dispense the product. When it comes to us trying to hire vets, as regards the term non-therapeutic, antiparasitics are called antiparasitic treatments. If an animal is be treated, sometimes it is a therapeutic and a non-therapeutic use all in one. However, the statutory instrument is written with non-therapeutic use in mind and therefore we legally cannot get vets to comply with the statutory instrument, because they would be in contravention of the law and of the Veterinary Council of Ireland, VCI, standards. Therefore, we cannot get vets to actually work with us. To put that in context, there is €400 million a year in the veterinary medicinal market. Veterinary practitioners currently dispense €300 million worth of that. Consequently, €100 million is now divided up across the rest of the sectors.

Regarding antiparasitic use, as the regulation itself states, we need to reduce the level of antiparasitics we are selling. They need to be driven down. The only way that will happen is to increase the sales of vaccines. Currently the statutory instrument precludes us from engaging vets to write a prescription for antiparasitics as they are non-therapeutic and the Department has decided in its wisdom not to allow us to prescribe vaccines. That means even if we can get vets to write the prescriptions we are not allowed to write prescription for the vaccines, and in theory we can dispense them, but we never will. I will go back to the dry cow tube example. We can stock them legally, but why would we stock them when only 2% are now being sold?

Most co-ops have ceased to stock intramammary tubes because they do not get the prescriptions to be able to dispense the product as it is dispensed by the prescribing vet and we cannot get vets to write prescriptions legally under the current structure of the statutory instrument.