Mr. Barry Lynch:

We thank the joint committee for giving of its time. We hope to be able to give it a good idea of the issues arising in this area. We submitted some of our documentation in advance of the meeting.

I will give some background information on the two companies. Kingswood Computing, which was founded by Mr. Gerry Lynskey in 1987, was the first company to sell farm management software to Irish farmers. Our company - Irish Farm Computers, which trades as AgriNet - was founded in 1994. The two companies have sold their products to between 70,000 and 80,000 farms in that period. Many of the larger commercial farms in Ireland use farm management software from one of the two companies. We are involved in every aspect of farm management data and record-keeping, including financial, animal, grassland, tillage and sheep records. We do everything one can think of in relation to what a farmer does on a personal computer when he or she is recording and managing data. Both companies have started to export in recent years and have good client bases in the United Kingdom and further afield. We are confident that there will be further expansion in that direction.

I would like to speak about the biggest challenge we face. This is a significant meeting for us because it allows us to highlight the problems caused by the efforts of the State to supply all information technology systems to farms and into agriculture. In the past five or ten years the number of services provided by the State has increased significantly. Everything we have been doing is now being done or will be done by the State. That is why we are here. As the title of our presentation suggests, we need to ensure the balance between the public and private sectors in the farm information technology sector is right. We do not think it is balanced. We are keen to explain that we are working in a toxic environment and want to know whether the committee is interested in redressing the balance. That is the objective of our attendance at this meeting.

I will refer briefly to the two slides being displayed. The first sets out the reasons we think this is a problem. If a solution can be brought to bear in this case, it will save money for the public. Given that our companies have been doing a fine job for many years - thousands of farmers have availed of our services - why does the State think it needs to get involved in this area now? Obviously, it costs the State money to provide the service we have been providing. Therefore, there will be a saving to the State if it no longer provides the service. The smaller the number of services provided by the State, the fewer expenses it will incur. We can do it. We have proved in the past that we can do it and we will do it into the future.

We need to protect sustainable jobs in small and medium-sized enterprises. We estimate that between 22 and 25 jobs have been lost across the two companies in the past ten years. This is a small area. One might ask what the big deal is when one is talking about two small companies and not that many jobs. We provide services for the top commercial farms in the country. The question of how the State is working in this area is hugely significant. Information technology and data play a major role in the Food Harvest 2020 vision of how agriculture can push ahead with increased production. The database system - how data are stored, managed and used - represents a massive part of the industry. Even though both companies are small, we are working in a significant area of the agricultural world. Farmers are trying to push ahead to have a 50% production figure here, there and everywhere in the next eight or nine years. Information technology and data management will play a huge part in that regard.

The next aspect of this issue I would like to mention is the need to support export-based jobs in small and medium-sized enterprises. We are confident that the two companies can build on the nice base we have developed abroad in the last couple of years. However, we cannot continue in the absence of a home market. The export aspect is very exciting for us because there is great potential in other countries. As we have developed overseas, we have realised that more can be achieved. We would like to make it clear that there was no market failure in terms of farmers using software. We can produce figures that support the logic we are using when we say this. There is no reason for the State to do something we have been doing and we have been providing a significant solution.

The taking of risks by the private sector is a big issue for us. We use the word "innovation" regularly in this context. Our business is all about innovation. If we invest money in the creation of innovative products, it does not make sense for the taxpayer to fund the provision of the same innovative products by the State sector. It is neither sustainable nor practical.

Intellectual property is another interesting aspect of this matter. All of our property is intellectual property. We do not have land or cows. We have nothing that can be touched, but we do have connections with our clients and intellectual property. It is an interesting point from the perspective of the smart economy and the knowledge economy. We think the intellectual property of our software is of value, but it does not seem to be of any value in the eyes of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

Competition is the bedrock of what we do. The two companies have been competing vigorously against each other since AgriNet entered the marketplace in 1995. Kingswood Computing had been the only company in the market before then. Both companies have now entered the UK market in which they are competing against each other.

Competition is good; I think everybody understands that. If the State is going to provide the same solution, where do we go with our competition? It is not sustainable and in the long term, it does not make sense. Farmers understand that competition is good. They always like getting a bargain so we can provide that bargain if we get a chance to do so. The EU obviously believes in competition.

I can outline the history. This is not something that we have been thinking about for the past couple of weeks or a few months. We have been chasing this thing for years so this meeting is the culmination or most significant event of that process. An ongoing probe by the office of the EU Commissioner for Competition that started two or three years ago is very much a live issue. I am sure it happens all the time but the EU views this as almost like e-government on steroids. It is just the State going too far. It does not know where to stop with e-government or in terms of providing IT services to any sector of its community, be it farming or something else. An interesting example is one of the State entities created by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. There is an interesting parallel in New Zealand where they did the same thing. They created an entity to provide major IT systems for farmers. They privatised it and then realised that they should not have done that because they regretted it and are now trying to haul the control of the national database on bovine data back from the private sector and into state ownership. That is a significant and interesting example and it would be well worth our while looking at what happened over there and seeing if we can learn something from it. The last point we would make is that fair play must be administered in terms of ethics and fairness. We do not see how it is practical or fair that functions that we are fit to provide to the farming community or in the farming business sector must be carried out by the State as well. It just does not make much sense.

Those are the key points and an introduction to the issues. I have explained why we are here and some of the reasons we feel it is good that we are here. We have a second slide that we can show later on, which is focused more on how we solve the problem and what we do going forward. If members have any specific questions, it is probably better that we start by going through the matters in which they might be interested.