Mr. Patrick Kent:

On sexed semen, the conception rates are lower. It is fine to use on heifers the first time. The dam breed will have to be put on the card of the calves. Otherwise farmers are buying a pig in a poke. It must be on the mart board because with the colours of some of these Kiwis the farmers do not know what they are buying. They are sold as Angus and the farmers do not realise that the dam is a Jersey-Kiwi cross. We need to get that information on the board in the marts and on the card. That must be done.

We must focus the minds of people working for the Government on large salaries and piggy-backing on our beef farmers. There has to be an independent hanging there. These people must be let off for a year or two. Let them go on holidays, put them on the equivalent of the farm assist and let them suffer what farmers are suffering. Then they might get around to getting the marketing right. They must get it right. It is selling the most easily marketed product in the world. It is grass fed and has the proper omega balance and so forth. Nobody in the world could compete with us if we marketed it correctly, but we do not have the marketing people in gear. They are just sitting on their hands and dumping it into the English market. We need to get some of the high prices that it is commanding in the restaurants in Europe back into the farmers' pockets.

As regards producing above 30,000 or 40,000, it has been a tradition that when the factories got more than 30,000 per week they cut the price and so forth. That must be monitored as well. Regarding the potential to sell another 10,000 of these minced up dairy cows, I believe there is potential to do it if the marketing is right. The product is certainly okay at a price. It is a seriously good product, and everybody will say that. It has the flavour, it is grass fed and has the right balance of nutrients.

I do not want to talk us into a dark hole of producing less. I would not advise farmers to start borrowing to produce more, but where they are in a system of production in which they know their costs to continue to produce below the cost of production is a no-no. Farmers will have to examine their consciences on that. Using up a single farm payment producing beef for big conglomerates that have a monopoly on the industry here cannot, and will not, continue. I know farmers who are changing. This winter is finishing many of them. From a GNP point of view this country will go into a serious decline in its production of beef. We will not be worrying about 30,000 per year but about less than that if we do not support these farmers, give some type of incentive and get money back into farmers' pockets.

Then there is the volume of paperwork farmers are doing and the compliance they must go through. The consumer is not demanding this at all. We have asked people from Tesco and so forth and they have never heard of restrictions with weight limits, residencies and the like. That is all conjured up between Bord Bia and the meat industry. Bord Bia is probably the main quango whose viability I would question. It is fantastic with statistics on where the meat is going, but that is a has-been. Getting the meat into new markets and getting a decent price for it back to the farmer is where the focus should be. We also must focus on sustainability. Keeping beef farmers in production must be the Government's priority. It is money well spent. It keeps rural Ireland alive. It is good for tourism as well because it makes Ireland look good. Eating beef also keeps people healthy. The knock-on effects across the economy are superb.