Mr. Cormac Cunningham:

I would turn that question on its head and say how come there is so much scope in the price that Glanbia cannot take it from the man next door and compete with us? How can we come all the way down, lift this milk, bring it up, process it and cart it the whole way down again and still manage to make a margin on it? I can assure the Deputy we can. We did not come up the Strule in a bubble as they say in Omagh. We are serious businessmen. We take our job and the livelihoods of our families and farmers very seriously. We do not want to put any of that at risk. We are in business and of course there are risks but we are very good at what we do. For the third time I invite the committee to come to see what we do. A huge number of farmers from the South have come through because of the advertisement. One of the first things they ask when they walk through the offices and the plant is where are all the people. We have a very happy contented staff, who work very well. There are very few of them.

I have walked around many dairy plants. Day and daily I walk through other dairy farms and there is huge scope in all of them, including our own, to be more efficient. At the minute, we believe that we have the most efficient plant on the island when it comes to processing liquid milk. That brings it back to the idea of investment and whether we should build another plant. We all know that the dairy industry will change when quotas go and in theory there could be an awful lot more milk but at the same time there are too many plants. For everybody’s benefit it is better to have fewer plants because it brings obvious efficiencies of scale, which is where I would use the word factory. Is it not more sensible on the island to have a significant manufacturing plant in the north and another in the south to manufacture liquid milk? This is not something that I alone propose but it has been proposed before now by independent industry commentators.