Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will start with Senator Burke's point. I was responding to his question about where the three to five year period came from. That is the general principle. It is about identifying the profitability of the company. To use ten years, it would need to be proven that the business had a cyclical nature. It is about trying to get away from one set year that might have been a bad year. Three years would normally give a fairly good mix of good, bad or medium years. Five years is a bigger spread and is the time period proposed by the Department, but if there is an example to say the nature of this business very clearly involves a ten-year cycle, where it has shown itself to be fairly stable despite ups and downs over the course of those ten years, evidence of this should be put forward and it will be looked at. I do not think anybody in this Chamber is trying to discount that, but if a case is to be made for ten years, which would not be the norm because it would be a very long period of time to use to assess the profitability of a company, it would need to be proven why that industry requires that.

In response to Senator Boyhan, it goes back to the point about drafts. I understand the farmers were furnished with them. The draft regulations are not regulations until legislation is passed.