Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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If one fifth of farmers registered for the scheme, having attended the meetings, this leaves four fifths who did not attend meetings. They will receive training some time in future.

I once asked a number of Deputies how many of them had read the Oireachtas safety statement which new Members receive when they enter the House. I hope Deputy Fitzmaurice, who is relatively new to the House, received a copy. We are all responsible legislators and the Oireachtas produced the legislation providing for mandatory safety statements in the workplace. If the Deputies to whom I spoke were in any way a representative sample, the number of colleagues who have read the safety statement is incredibly small, particularly when one takes into account the highly responsible job we have and the fact that we introduced legislation providing for safety statements in the belief that they are a great idea. I make this point because Departments and official bodies present farmers with 50-page printed documents setting out terms and conditions and so forth. When a farmer does not follow the conditions, as laid down, the officials will say "Tough luck" and the farmer will lose X amount of money for not reading the document. It is a case of good luck, goodbye and goodnight. If we applied the same approach to Oireachtas Members with regard to safety statements, none of us would get paid.

For this reason, we must accept that if we are relying on the fine print that is conveyed in written documents, we can forget it. Even if information is being conveyed at meetings that farmers are obliged to attend as a condition of the scheme, those present may not fully concentrate on the proceedings. I do not know how many times Deputies have made a public statement on radio and people have come back to us having got the message arseways. That is a common phenomenon, which is the reason I do not like the penalty regime.

It has been correctly pointed out that if one uses artificial insemination multiple times, the law of averages dictates that the farmer should pass the test within five or six years. If one calculated, on an actuarial basis, the chances of the Titanic sinking in the middle of the Atlantic killing such a large number of people, the large number of things that would have to go wrong would indicate that the chances of the vessel sinking would be minuscule. One hears the various statistical scenarios about the Titanichaving to turn left or right or having to be five minutes early or late. Nonetheless, the Titanic sank, which demonstrates that the most unlikely events occur, even though statistically they are very unlikely.

To return to the artificial insemination bull, will it be mandatory on AI providers to set out in large red or black print the reliability of the data on which the rating of their bull is based at that point in time? I understand there will be bulls in the catalogues which may have a reliability rating of less than 40%. One would be careful about putting €1,000 on a bet in Paddy Power with those odds, not to speak of €10,000. This process involves considerable sums of money, both in terms of the value of the progeny on the market and the lost grants.

If I understand the position correctly, the ICMF's problem is that the scheme is new in that genotyping and data collection are new and the longer and more consistently the ICMF receives the data, the more the actuarial level will increase. After five or six years, it will plateau at a high level of accuracy but at the beginning, the reliability of the bulls is lower because the ICMF does not have much data on them or their progeny. In that case, would it not have been better to have removed the penalties from the game on the basis that the market will look after people doing the right thing? Would it not be preferable not to introduce penalties until the scheme has been operating for a long period, farmers have acclimatised to it and much more reliable data are available? Once the data are available, the penalties could be introduced over time, perhaps in the next round of the scheme. At that stage, I assume penalties would not be necessary because most farmers would be doing the right thing as the market will determine that it would be sensible to do so.

It is a statistical fact that 48% of herds have fewer than ten cows. I was surprised to learn from the data supplied by the Department that approximately 45% of herds in counties Carlow and Kilkenny have fewer than ten suckler cows. It is not the case, therefore, that the smaller herds are all located on the west coast as there are many smaller herds on the east coast. While there are fewer herds in the east than in the west, the variation in herd size is not dramatically different between the regions. In other words, a high proportion of herds in the east are small in number, notwithstanding what many east coast farmers may believe.

There are some very large herds in the west. If a suckler farmer is using artificial insemination, how many bulls, or AI bulls, are recommended if he has eight cows? If he gets it wrong, he is in trouble five years down the road.