Mr. Teddy Cashman:

I thank the Deputy. At the start of this process when we set up the subgroups, I was very keen that we would have Bord Bia involvement on the venison subcommittee in particular. We also had somebody from the Restaurants Association of Ireland, game dealers and hunters. We did not have farmers on the venison subcommittee because they were not relevant to that particular subcommittee. All of these issues were raised. Agriland.ie had an article in recent days on the recommendations made, including the statutory instrument I mentioned and establishing an international market for venison.

Currently, many of the game dealers buying venison from hunters in Ireland are exporting it directly to Scotland. It appears to be a developed market for venison and this is where the meat is going. I think there are many gaps in the venison scenario in Ireland. Bord Bia has done some work in this area, but not a lot. We will engage with it further when we have gone farther down along the road from the perspective of volumes.

This is something that concerns me a small bit in the sense of marketing and dealing with the venison. There is viable and non-viable venison. Many females and smaller animals will have to be culled to bring the numbers down because these are the animals that will bring down the population and not so much the stags. Stags seem very impressive visually but they are not very useful from the point of bringing down the size of the population. Regarding what was referred to earlier in the scenario, a certain proportion of this meat will have to go into the pet food trade or something like that. A portion of the meat will, however, be good-quality venison. We need more of an infrastructure around the country to deal with this type of meat, including larders for hunters and chillers they can bring the deer to and deer agencies can come to collect them from. Some of this kind of infrastructure exists now. It is not entirely absent around the country.