Ms Tara McCarthy:

I apologise but we were not familiar with this report before it was brought to our attention today. We have looked at the recommendations made within the report and which were referenced during the meeting. We were chatted through some sort of fair trade concept and there was a familiarity or similarity running through each of the report's recommendations on understanding how better to integrate the supply chain with the market to achieve better returns. We have no problem looking at that. Anything we do must be linked to a market requirement and buy-in from the industry. If we create a quality assurance scheme into which the industry does not buy, we have wasted our time and our money. We are going into deep stakeholder consultation on all of our work and, having read the recommendations somewhat briefly, we have no issue committing to asking industry, within our strategy development process, to come together to find out the appetite in the market, among distillers or drinks producers and among farmers, for something workable within this. However, there is only so much we can do in this context from within our remit versus others.

We have two pressure points, the first of which is state aid rules which prevent us from advertising "made in Ireland" as a point of differentiation. However, we can advertise that a product has its origin in Ireland as part of a quality assurance or traceability scheme. If that is the route industry decides it would like to go down, we will definitely have a role. Origin Green is not the "Buy Irish" campaign in any sense. It is a sustainability scheme. Clearly, we can communicate the work being done under that banner. In relation to the three issues that the committee raises with us, we can commit to bringing industry together to discuss solutions which may be within our remit and to see if there is an appetite for that. Once again, we will not be able to decide who gets the premium and where. We can, however, decide whether putting the infrastructure in place represents a good investment.