Mr. Edmond Phelan:

With the markets, what has happened over the past number of years is that output has increased but prices have not. Be it beef or dairy, if people are not getting bigger they are losing out. This is being seen more on the dairy side, so I will leave it to the ICMSA to talk about that. Farmers are going up to 200 or 400 cows. Where does it stop? Are we going to go to a New Zealand scenario? That has knock-on effects for beef as we have overproduction and that is why prices are very poor for beef at the moment.

The calf issue is, again, more of a question for the ICMSA but it does affect us. I do not know the answer. The Wicklow Calf Company has said that flying the calves out is just not an option. The cost is out of the question so that will not work. It will have to be some ferry, whether direct to the Continent or through the land bridge. I do not know. As was said earlier, we need an awful lot more ferries because a ferry can do two trips a day to Wales but it takes two days for one trip to France so we would need four times the ferry capacity to haul the same amount of goods.