Mr. Ray Doyle:

Deputy Kenny's question about the boat dovetails with Deputy Cahill's question about the north African trade. There are only three or four vessels that jump through the hoops of EU registration and approval and are licensed to take animals out of the country. Various stringent parameters apply, for example, they must be stable. These boats are off in various parts of the world because live exports go around the globe. It is sometimes difficult to get one's hands on one of these boats. The number that comply with EU legislation and our Department's standards is quite low. That trade occurs only when it is economic. The amount the north African countries can pay is sometimes quite small. Letters of credit have to be generated and some of the north African countries have been politically unstable in the recent past. That happened too in the Turkish market which was showing plenty of promise for us until a year and a half ago when the currency took a nosedive.

We do not have home markets for these animals. We do not have a well-developed meat industry. The Dutch have because it has been a tradition for them. They have ready access to the raw material to feed these animals, such as milk powders. We do not have that tradition.

The core point is that the suggestion that the EU may completely ban live transport of animals from the EU to third country markets needs to be resisted with the assistance of this committee, the Department and beyond in Europe. Such a ban would be the thin end of the wedge as far as the non-governmental organisations, NGOs, are concerned. If they got live transport of animals from the EU to third countries banned, we would lose our potential in the north African markets and the Turkish market. They are being lost because there is no consistency in the EU 27 to enact a law that has been in place since 2005. The Bulgarian border is the flashpoint with the third country of Turkey. The combination of Turkey and its issues, and the control posts, has led to the notion that we should simply ban all transport of live animals simply because one member of the EU has an internal difficulty in manning its control points. This could suddenly mean we lose live transports within the EU. The NGOs would be delighted to have third country exports banned because they would then go for banning all live transport of animals. They have a notion that this is all integrated and an animal should not be moved unless it is going direct to slaughter, or they do not want them slaughtered at all. That is fine if that is their belief but if there is an integrated approach that we cannot transport an animal, it will annihilate farming as we know it.