Mr. Daragh Quinn:

I will comment on the move into the Irish market of what we will refer to as the corporates. Corporates are active in buying veterinary practices throughout Ireland. There is no doubt about that. Like anybody who buys a business, if you invest a substantial amount of money in buying a business, you are looking for a return. You get a return from your business by doing two things, namely, by increasing sales and by increasing margin. If the current proposal was carried through as it is proposed at the moment, that would move the emphasis of the sales to veterinary practices. That would be the way they would increase their volume of business. If you end up in a situation whereby only one stakeholder group is involved in the supply of any product, it would be anti-competitive. That would be the word to describe it. You can dominate the market and you can create whichever price you wish. Remember that if a corporate owns it, it does not take over one veterinary practice, but a group of veterinary practices that are geographically near to one another so that it can dominate a certain sector of the industry in the county or the county in its entirety. It then has the ability. Everybody becomes a customer of that veterinary practice and the veterinary practice becomes the only entity that can issue a prescription. It will then hold all the key cards in its hand to issue the prescription. It will carry out the diagnosis, it will prescribe the product and it will also supply it. The world really is its oyster. As the Deputy can appreciate, when a customer is standing at the counter, he or she is getting a product that cannot be supplied anywhere else. Then, obviously, the ability of the retailer to get an increased margin is presenting itself. Anybody who is commercially driven will take the margin. Does that pick up on the point?