Mr. Conor Geraghty:

There are 3,600 vets on the register. Some 90% of the large animal work, according to the Department, is done by about 600 or 650 vets. The rest of those vets are in various other sectors. We have lost 22% of large animal practices already. As people are aware, practices come in and, the next thing is, farmers get letters saying those practices are not doing large animals anymore, that they have sold or whatever. This is an issue and it has been debated here. We have looked at new veterinary schools and all the rest of it. However, ten new veterinary schools will not solve the problem if only 9% to 11% of what comes out of those veterinary schools are attracted into farm animal veterinary because 9% to 11% retire anyway - or maybe more. That is the first thing.

The second question is a chicken and egg thing. If you give them less work to do, will you have more vets or fewer vets? We contend that, with what is currently happening, we will have less vets because, basically, we have been squeezed on all sides. It is a very seasonal thing in Ireland, not like the rest of Europe. We need a pile of vets at a certain time of the year, or maybe two peaks in the year. The rest of the year, vets are looking at us, wondering what they are going to do. Like it or not, we have an awful lot more lax regulation on medicines and vaccines in Ireland than in much of Europe. We talk about the separation of supply and prescription. In much of Europe, such as in Belgium, France and Holland - our major competitors - only a vet can give a vaccine to the animal. Our regulation is much more lax. That is probably because if you look at what is required on a vaccine, many things can go wrong, whether it is self-injection, mutations, adverse effects if you give it to an animal with a temperature, etc. Getting back to our current problem, we have a situation where there are approximately 499-odd practices, according to the Department, that want an NVPS. We looked at the Veterinary Council figures and thought it was around 434. If we are losing 22% of them, we are under pressure. We had to take on the NVPS, which is more or less done. There are four suppliers of IT software into veterinary practices. There are two main ones. Both of them have two software engineers each. They have to go to a veterinary practice and spend two or three days there setting it up. They are making their way around the country. They have done well in four months to get it up to 81%. I was listening in on the committee meeting two weeks ago on the ACRES IT system. To be fair, we think they have done very well, especially during the busiest time of the year, when no one wants to see software engineers in the middle of a veterinary practice.