Mr. John O'Sullivan:

In response to Deputy Deering's question, I may best answer it by describing my experience over the years. Our family milks a herd of dairy cows just north of Cork city. We have a big emphasis on breeding because we are members of the Irish Holstein Friesian Association. At the time of the advent of ICBF, along with our national obligation to register the birth of every calf with the Department, as members of the herd book we had to register the birth of every calf with the breed society herd book which is located in Rickmansworth in Herefordshire in England. The association has 3,000 members and we were sending a registration fee of £10, as it was at the time, for up to 100,000 calves. This money was going over to Rickmansworth. Everyone engaged in that exercise was employed in the UK. With the advent of the database, we saw an opportunity to bring home this business and to have our own herd book in this country to provide services to our members. I was the chairman of the association at the time. We employed just one liaison officer to work with the 3,000 members and to solve any issues arising between the Irish breeder and the organisation in the UK. As a result, we left the UK parent organisation in 2002. We bought our own office in Clonakilty. The organisation now employs 13 full-time employees. The charge is €13 per registration. At this stage this is considerably less than the £10 we were sending to the UK at the time. That €13 per registration stays here in Ireland. The 13 full-time employees are not ICBF employees but without the benefit of the integrated database, our organisation would not be in a position to support having a herd book here.

Similarly, we are involved in breeding and it is essential to measure the performance of our animals. The milk is recorded monthly. A milk recorder comes from our milk recording organisation, takes a milk sample and a print-out from the on-farm computer for the amount of milk from the individual cow. The big advantage from the point of view of the milk recording organisation is that the information collected by the recorder and the resultant analysis of the milk sample is entered in the database which calculates the up-to-date milk yields and constituents for each individual animal. I receive that report electronically from the database to my Kingswood herd programme. That information is then retained on the Kingswood programme on my farm computer on my desk and is instantly accessible.

We calve a lot of cows in the autumn because we supply the liquid milk business. We have to make decisions with regard to which animals to use on our cows in three weeks' time, for example, when we start the insemination programme. A big advantage of the ICBF database is that it provides access to bulls from all over the world who have been progeny tested in Ireland, the UK, the United States, New Zealand and Czechoslovakia, for example. I can key in the name of a bull on the database. With ICBF's involvement with an international organisation called Interbull, I can have information on how that bull's progeny could be expected to perform in Ireland. I can then make an immediate direct comparison between the performance of that bull and any other bull I am thinking of using.

I had the responsibility of doing the paperwork for the pedigree animals on our farm since I was 14 years of age. The difference between how it was done when I was 14 to how it is done now is unimaginable. I go to different parts of the world because of my interest in cattle breeding. No matter where I go, there is no system anywhere else around the world that can compare with what we have here. As a farmer I am very proud of the fact that our organisation, the Holstein Friesian Association, put a substantial sum of money as a shareholding into this organisation. My dairy co-operative is a shareholder. I am a member of the IFA and it put money into it. We farmers are really proud of this organisation which we have financed and set up. It is delivering for farmers. We get a very small percentage of our annual budget from the Government to do work that was previously government work and which would cost multiples of our costs if it were still government work.

In response to Deputy Deering's question about competition, I answer by saying there is no competition but rather there is co-operation and significant efficiency and benefits delivered to all of us as dairy farmers. As chairman of this organisation, I know I can say this organisation is delivering enormously for farmers. If anything were to happen to jeopardise the work of this organisation, there would be a lot of disaffection among farmers.