Mr. Peter Nallen:

As I have said, we have ongoing discussions through the IFA where we are looking at the next version of the model. There is another meeting tomorrow. We will be taking into consideration the potential changes or challenges that may arise from Brexit, be it a hard or soft one. We also look at the value for money of our crop under the Teagasc costings, which are produced on an annual basis. Looking at that, one will see that if malting barley is not the top tillage crop in the country it is certainly the second. There is a viable and sustainable income to be made growing malting barley.

One of the questions that was raised earlier, which maybe I did not answer, concerned the loyalty of our growers. We have more expressions of interest than we have people leaving and no longer growing malting barley. On an annual basis, out of 600 growers I would guess that we might have less than five or six who choose, for different reasons, to exit the growing of malting barley. I would say we have about ten times that inquiring about having a malting barley contract. For us, those are positive signals that the industry is doing something right.

Are we fully there yet? The answer is "No". Are we working in a better way, and are we working better this year than last year? I believe we are. I think all of the facts, figures and statistics, over the last seven years in particular, show that it is an industry which is going places.

It has a future. There is a future if all of us, stakeholders, growers, ourselves, brewers and distillers, are committed to having a fully Irish supply chain with Irish barley, Irish malt, Irish whiskey and Irish beer. We are looking then at an even more significant requirement going forward. We are looking at 60,000 ha this year and we expect that to be even more next year. Expressions of interest far exceed the contrary.