Mr. Tom?s Bourke:

I will answer the Deputy's question on the figures. Consistently, the levels of live imports from Northern Ireland have ranged between 300,000 and 400,000 live lambs for direct slaughter, with carcass imports ranging from 6,000 to 8,000 tonnes per year. As the committee will see, when those two figures are put together it is 20% of the overall production.

Mr. Comiskey has dealt with the labelling issue. This has been a clear call out to the competent authorities in relation to their obligations on the processes around labelling.

With regard to the current prices, it is important to keep the order of events in context. In 2020 the average lamb price for the entire year was €4.97 per kg. In 2021 it was €6.67 and in 2022 it was €6.80. In effect, we had got prices to a place where there was a reasonable return for sheep farmers had we not, as the president said, had the crisis in Ukraine. This exploded the actual input costs on our farms. Unfortunately, as alluded to already, lamb is an expensive protein. Seemingly, the market has not been able to return any higher price while on the other hand we have incurred additional costs of production, which has effectively eroded our margins. It is important to put it into context that we are almost €2 per kg above where we were only three years ago, but the imbalance has been created and the margins have been eroded, not by the price per se, but by the actual impact of cost of production on the farm.

The Deputy will have noted from numerous communications from the IFA throughout the last number of years as we are approaching every budget annually, and prior to the discussions on the last CAP, that the IFA policy position prior to any of this has been a call out for a direct support payment of €30 per ewe, and that call remains.