Mr. Adrian Cummins:

I will take the question about insurance and input costs. Price gouging is going on constantly with insurance. We use a broker for our association members. If it is able to get up to a 30% discount for our members, there must be absolute price gouging going on in the insurance industry. We do not see those charges coming down even though all the great work has been done by the Oireachtas in trying to help our industry. The insurance industry is not passing on the reductions and it should.

With regard to input costs, quite correctly, the Senator pointed out beef is at 96%. With farm to fork, something is going in the middle. The food regulator needs to have more powers up to the level of the competition authority to go in, look at the books in terms of processors and see how and why we have been paying a 90% increase on beef for the past two years. When you look at other inputs, fruit and vegetables is 50% and chocolate is 157%. Somebody is making a lot of money in some part of the food chain. When we have to buy it in from the wholesaler, we have seen increases in the past three years. I will pass on to Mr. Collender to speak about VAT and PRSI.