Mr. Joe O'Flaherty:

I will take the first part of that question and then pass back to my colleague, Ms McCoy.

In answer to Senator O'Keeffe's question on the strategy and what exactly we had set out, I suppose we could have set out a target for the period to 2014, but we felt that it would be foolish to do so in the absence of good information. As Ms McCoy has mentioned, we have cell count information from approximately one third of the herds in the country, which are the milk recorded herds. That may well be a biased sample. They may be the better herds. We do not quite know. We felt that the more prudent approach was to develop what Deputy Deering referred to, namely, a national database of all of the processors' supply and collate that in a single database, which we are doing. We hope to have completed in the next couple of months the figures for 2011 and 2012. That will give us a solid base from which we can measure progress and we can set out clearly in our future business plans how quickly we intend to move forward from that. This is a programme which is very much driven by market signals and if the market is demanding that the processor produces milk of a particular standard, that market signal will come back quickly to the farmer in the form of a price bonus, the exclusion of that milk or the application of a penalty if the milk exceeds a particular limit.

Progress can be made rapidly. We could have taken a guesstimate of a figure for the level of progress but we decided that what we would do was collate a robust national figure, and we intend to have that within the next couple of months. In that regard, we are getting good co-operation from all of the major dairy processors. I will leave the rest of the question with Ms McCoy.