Mr. Ray Doyle:

I could not agree more with Deputy Cahill. My point was perhaps misunderstood. Certain countries within the EU are trumping the regulations and seeking to go beyond them. We are fully compliant. I fully defend Council Regulation (EC) No 1/2005 as being a perfect standard to ensure good animal welfare. We are complying with it and are happy to comply with it. Some countries, unfortunately, are taking a unilateral decision, and some consumers are also taking a unilateral decision, to impose standards that I agree will be uneconomic for us to comply with. We have to deal with the cards we have, however, and one of those at the moment is the issue in Cherbourg. Our bigger issue is to promote live exports to deal with our increase in calf registrations of 400,000 in the past five years.