Mr. Eddie Punch:

The first thing is to press pause on allowing the money to go back to Brussels. The clock is ticking and we need to get an extension on that. It is the first thing and it is urgent. The second piece is that the Minister needs to direct his Department to put in a bit of effort to be creative and imaginative. Genomic tagging is being subsidised by the Brexit adjustment reserve, BAR. That happened because the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation, ICBF, thought long and hard about how it could justify using the Brexit adjustment reserve to pay for the genomic tags, or at least to subsidise them. As we said in our submission, there are various reasons the sheep sector should get this money. There are various ways to demonstrate that the sheep sector was impacted by Brexit more than any other sector. The import of live lambs from Northern Ireland, which is a big business and worth €400,000 a year, is possible because of the way Brexit was done. Some of that was positive. We were all pleased in the aftermath of Brexit that a deal was done to keep the status quofrom the point of view of cattle, and predominantly beef, going to the UK. The downside is that it has left us very vulnerable to the UK in terms of competition and to Northern Irish lambs coming into the country for processing or further processing. There was an issue in respect of the way in which the quotas were dealt with. The UK immediately used its post-Brexit freedom to add more quotas for itself. All of these things are unique to the sheep sector. They are unique challenges that no other sector had.

We have discussed the matter with the Minister and his officials. The only argument I hear them making, and I think it is flawed, is that the price of sheep meat is higher in 2022 and 2023 than it was in 2016. That is a poor argument.