Mr. Terence O'Shea:

The group I represent, the ILMA, articulates the difficulties and views of about 350 small merchants throughout the Twenty-six Counties, myself included. We have done a fairly substantial assessment. Did everybody buy into it? No, they did not, but from our feedback we could count 38 merchants we genuinely believed would remain in business if officials in the Department made the appropriate amendments to the SI and the prescribing protocol. In that alone, we are losing eight of every nine members we have.