Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that the ICBF is engaging with cattle breeders. The board of the ICBF is made up of farmers and farm representatives. It has an important task. Whenever it makes adjustments like this, they will not be easy. In the past, before we had the ICBF star ratings, one had to learn from experience, and one did not really know and had to figure out year to year, from hard learning, what was a good breed or what was not. The idea now is that with the star ratings and gathering evidence, people now have more certainty about what the merits of a particular animal are, which improves the profitability in the process. It is important that whenever one has a change of evidence and data, such as if the evidence in the review of a 4-star hotel indicated that it is now a 3-star hotel, there is no point in trying to tell people it still has four stars when it has three stars, and one has to try to work with that adjustment.

I am doing it with the SCEP scheme by saying that any cows in it which were 4-star or 5-star cows before the adjustment will continue to be paid as 4-star or 5-star cows. That gives farmers the capacity and space to be able to change their breeding policy for replacements. Given that 84% of animals are not changing from 4-star or 5-star animals, and there will be differences in different herds, where it will be more or less, if 84% of cows in the average herd stay the same and 16% adjust, farmers will be taking their replacements from the 84% that have stayed the same. They will plug that into their future breeding because that tells them where the profitability will be.

I know there has been much engagement about the way that the star ratings have been put together and whether it is appropriate. There needs to be good engagement on that. The ICBF does much work on that. I am being helpful in any way that I can with regard to the SCEP scheme because it is making farmers more profitable. That profitability is based on the fact that one adjusts the rating as one gathers more and more evidence. That is why it works and how one makes sure that people are as profitable as possible.

See this speech in context