Denis Drennan

incurred an extra cost because of this war in Iran.

Absolutely.

But I suppose where the issue is here, David, is that everybody is complaining about the increase in the cost of food at the moment.

And look, same as everybody else, I go to my weekly shopping and I fill my supermarket trolley and get the things I need to eat every week.

And they have gone up exponentially in the last number of months, actually in the last number of years since the Ukraine war.

But, I mean, people are going to have to accept that, like, what's happening at household level with everybody's ESB bill, their kerosene bill, their diesel bill, their labour bill, that has gone up, like, at a multiple, at a farm level.

So it's just not possible to produce food for the price it used to be produced for

And certainly the consumer is going to have to put their hand in their pocket for the simple reason like that.

All the extra costs cannot be borne from the supermarket shelves backwards.

They're going to have to go straight through the whole supply chain.

And that's where we really need transparency in the supply chain, in the whole food supply chain, that people can see exactly who's making what from the products as they end up at the price they end up on the supermarket shelves.

Actually, the system is already in place, David, because we have what's called a fertiliser register database.

So the department, when I go buy my fertiliser...

Whoever I buy the fertiliser from, whether it's my local co-op or merchant, they have to register that fertiliser to my herd number.

So the department has all this information already and knows exactly who has bought fertiliser and what quantities they've already bought.

So it's a very simple system and that's why we've urged the government to use this.

Well, first of all, to top it up by the maximum 200% that's allowable under EU rules.

And then to target that money to the people who really needed it, people who bought that really expensive fertiliser, as I said, the percentage increase in protected urea, which I've regulated and mandated to use, has gone from €5.20 per tonne to €800 per tonne, and even more in some cases, depending on when it was bought.

Well, it's a huge deal.

I mean, we've a fantastic climate here for growing grass.