Ms Claire McGlynn:

I can take the comment on the qualitative data. As part of our project, we wanted to come out at the end of it with statistics and figures to show how beneficial this was over the course of the project. I have a few statistics here that I can share. Some 41% of the participants had elevated blood pressures; 39% of the participants had not had their blood pressure checked in more than a year; and 2% stated that they have never had their blood pressure checked, which is a stark figure. Some 4.4% then required immediate medical attention. That requires the Croí nurses to send them directly to their local GP if they could get in or, if not, it was straight to the local hospital. Those were stark figures on our end. There were elevated blood pressure levels on the day when we spoke to the farmers on the ground. They were not aware that they had these underlying issues, so it was very important to have them there on the day. It was easy access for them to get that service. The importance of that project was that we had a follow-up on this. The nurses followed up with our participants three to four weeks after they had their checks. They made sure that the participant followed up with their doctor and there was this check. That is a very important part of our project and we want that to continue so that they get the full importance out of this check.

Following on from that, we had the mental health assessment. There was a comment on how we get these vulnerable people to come into us to have a health check. To be honest, we did not have that issue. We had a huge demand for this service from day one. We had many different scenarios where wives were encouraging farmers - their husbands - to get in the queue. When they got into the queue, we had the consent form and the mental health questionnaire was part of their consent form. They were in the queue for their physical health check, which was their cholesterol and blood pressure check but, along with that, was their mental health assessment. That is where they felt comfortable in opening up and having that conversation with us, who were there are on the ground, and the farm family committee was there to help us. Some of the figures out of that are we had 58% of farmers who never or rarely felt relaxed; 49% never or rarely felt confident in themselves; and 46% never or rarely felt optimistic about the future. Those are figures we have taken from our project and we plan to build on this further as we progress this project throughout the year ahead. Those are the figures we have about that.

On ploughing, we will be there in full force at the ploughing championship this year. We were there last year. It was actually our first event last year of the start of the project. We completed more than 350 checks during the course of the ploughing. We will be in full force again this year and we are looking forward to starting the project.