Mr. Tom?s Bourke:

I will field a few of those questions and then Mr. Comiskey will pick up on others, particularly on the issue of wool because he sits on the wool council, which has had just one meeting. As the Deputy said, we have seen this type of scenario in a number of other sectors with market volatility and the challenges it poses. It is something we mentioned earlier in the context of where the supports are now for food production within the EU from our perspective within this country. We effectively do not have any. We have raised the standards. We have increased the costs on farmers while at the same time taking away the direct supports to produce food and we have transitioned those into environmental payments. The sheep sector in its own right had €476 million of export value to the national economy last year, which is a significant increase on the previous year. At the same time, farmers' income is down 81%. That shows the dysfunction of the market and the inability of the market to return what is needed to farmers for producing food of the standard of the sheep meat produced in this country. There is only one mechanism to address that. We are starting to hear more and more soundings about food security and food sovereignty since the Ukrainian crisis. Unfortunately, that was too late for the direction of travel of the current CAP, where the moneys that were previously directed towards productive farmers based on their level of production have now been moved towards an area-based system.

The Deputy asked the correct question as regards where we have to get back to. The sheep sector in particular is a low-income vulnerable sector on a small scale, with the average flock being 75 ewes. It does not have the capacity to absorb the volatility of a world market or the influence of world events on market prices. The solution to this is directly supporting production on those farms and supporting it at a meaningful level. We have seen the figures from the economics of sheep farms from last year. The entirety of the €7 return per ewe came from the sheep welfare scheme, which was a payment of €10. If we are to be serious about providing a bit of sustainability and confidence in the sector to consider future options, even along the lines of what Mr. Michael Crosse and Mr. Brendan Crosse have discussed, there has to be some long-term security and sustainability provided from an economic perspective. That can only be provided by direct payments, which is why we have called out the need for the €30 payment. The €2 increase to €12 is certainly not going to address the dynamic, based on Teagasc and Bord Bia predictions for this year as regards costs and potential markets. The markets are significantly behind last year at this point in time, with costs expected to run similar to last year's levels. We are currently €16 per lamb off where we need to be and that is in a year where we only made €7 per ewe. The additional €2 will not provide any solace or address the seriousness of the crisis we are in.

Mr. Comiskey will pick up on the point about the wool council. We visited British Wool in Bradford and looked at the structures in place there. Clearly, there is an issue around the volume of wool we have and justifying a washing plant in this country but we have to look a bit further and look at the type of wool we produce in the main. From what we have been told by the industry, it is a coarse enough wool and in that regard it does not command a premium price on the other end. There are some exceptions but that is the case with the flock we have in general here. However, there are multiple uses for wool. We hear about insulation, the potential for fertiliser pellets and all of that. There are multiple uses where value can be added to this product. The difficulty is that the vast majority will not return at the farm gate and would not cover the cost of shearing. If we are serious about our bioeconomy and utilising this hugely valuable resource that is created on farms and produced every year, we need to reward farmers. We should do that in the first instance from a welfare perspective with regard to shearing and the costs associated with it. Second, in order to reduce the cost of adding value to that product further and doing processing, we need to create an incentive for farmers to present the wool in better condition, to reduce the cost as we go into second and third level processing and make the product more utilisable. We were very disappointed with the wool feasibility study. As the Deputy outlined, our understanding was that the purpose of that study was to identify these areas rather than flag the questions. I will let Mr. Comiskey deal with the matter of the wool council.