Mr. Ray Doyle:

I will try to address all of those points. I could not agree more with the Senator about the inconvenience. It is the reason we need to stay in business and have maximum availability. It is in keeping with the regulation to maintain current supply routes.

On the extra cost, the problem is that the antiparasitic treatments were up-regulated by the Health Products Regulatory Authority, HPRA, to prescription-only medicines, POM, so they necessitated prescriptions. That ship has sailed and we understand that, so we have to deal with the cost of the prescription. We will have to take on board that cost if we want to sell the products, which is what we are trying to do with this statutory instrument. Unfortunately, that is now a cost all farmers will have to be burdened with.

A prescription was always required for dry cow tubes. We had a different prescribing regime in place. It started in 2007 but expired in 2019 when this new regulation came in. The new statutory instrument is endeavouring to fill that gap so that we can credibly engage with veterinary practitioners to legally write the prescriptions, which is what we want to do that, but there are too many hurdles in our way. In theory, we can access the NVPS to dispense a product but in practice, it will be dispensed before the NVPS has a chance to create this alleged free and competitive market for it because it simply will not be credible. The example is the dry cow tubes. We have legally been able to dispense them since 2022 with a prescription on the NVPS, but farmers do not come in with prescriptions because they have already been dispensed by veterinary practitioners and the alleged free market we are supposed to have simply does not exist. We want to engage the veterinary practitioners, pay them for their services and prescribing, and try to sell the product through that.

I will revert to the big figures I had. Veterinary medicines amount to €400 million in total. Already, €300 million of that is being dispensed through veterinary channels. All we are trying to do is to maintain what we have. We are faced with a falling market in antiparasitics. The Senator touched on AMR, but we are all agreed that antiparasitic resistance is a bigger problem.