Mr. Con Traas:

Farmers are pretty much regulated and administrated by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Once you start doing something with the product on the farm, such as Senator Ahearn's family has done on the family farm in terms of the whiskey or I have done on my farm, you interact with other Departments. The LEADER groups and the local enterprise offices are very helpful.

I was doing something with the local enterprise office only a short time ago regarding a European presentation we were making and much of the talk in that meeting was about programmes that are now coming out of Europe and how the environmental focus is going to be so important to projects that we choose to deliver as food producers. Farmers are known as food producers. If we want to access funds, we have to think very quickly and creatively about how we can run an environmentally sustainable business and so forth. On that side of things, it looks quite hopeful. In our network in the county, we are going to be fairly quick about seeing what is available to us and that will feed back to the members. For farmers, they are in a one-stop-shop in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and that, perhaps, makes it a little more difficult.