Ms Isolde Goggin:

I thank the Chairman. I will divide the responses up because the Deputies and Chairman covered a lot of ground there. I will start by referring to a couple of overarching things. Obviously, ensuring a fair standard of living for primary producers is absolutely a valid objective, and it should be looked after. Equally, from our point of view, ensuring that consumers are fairly treated, that they do not bear the brunt of regulation and that they do not have all the costs passed on to them is also valid and that is our objective. We do not see ourselves, as one organisation, possibly resolving all of those tensions. If there are tensions there it is natural in a democratic society but we do not see that one could encompass the two without one's head exploding. There would not be a degree of consistency in decision making or in the allocation of resources, which is a big issue in this regard. We feel that they are both valid but they come from different articles of the EU treaty and they have different objectives. We see them as being quite apart.

I will not get into the nitty gritty of the enforcement issues but I will ask Mr. Murphy to speak about that shortly. In response to the comments by Deputy Penrose and others, our point about the effectiveness of the regulation is that currently if one wants to impose fines one has to go to court. If a case goes to court then one needs evidence. One cannot go to court with anecdotal evidence. A witness is required to stand up, and this is the difficulty. As people have pointed out they do not want to be the subject of potential retaliation and they do not even want to be identified. With regard to enforcement, we have to square that circle somehow. We have been told that there are difficulties in giving administrative bodies the power to impose fines themselves, which means one is then into a court scenario and the standard of evidence where the criminal burden of proof is beyond reasonable doubt. That is also the reason given in a whole lot of areas we go across and this is why I mention it.

Deputy Cahill asked about expenditure on food. We did a lot of work on this issue last year in relation to Brexit. I will ask my colleague Mr. O'Leary to address this and some of the other issues.