Mr. Ray Doyle:

I will address some of those points. One of the problems we have is the way our dairy industry has evolved. It is predominantly grass-based and extremely seasonal. About 700,000 calves will be born this February out of a total of 2.4 million. Some of our competitors in Europe are calving all year around. They do not have this big bulge of calves to deal with and those calves are transported small distances. Calves from Germany that end up in veal lots in the Netherlands are only on the trucks for four or five hours. There is no problem in that case in complying with the 9-1-9 regulations. The 12 hour stop is an EU regulation so we cannot change it. We cannot get away from leaving the calves for that 12 hour period.

Senator Mulherin asked if we need more markets. We do, of course. Deputy Fitzmaurice clearly stated that once we go over 30,000 animals slaughtered per week we are price takers at farm level. We have been at 40,000 per week for four or five months of this year and the resultant weakness in the beef price can be seen. That is the issue with these calves. We could do with every single market we can get to try to bring the market back to equilibrium. At present, calves go to veal units, older calves go to Spain and older animals still go to North Africa. We need to keep and develop all of those markets as much as we can. One of my points concerning Bord Bia related to that issue. It needs to best resource live exports. I do not know what portion of Bord Bia's overall budget is put towards live exports. Perhaps that needs a fresh look from Bord Bia's point of view.