Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am unsure how long the management at Silvercrest Foods has been in place. I imagine the management system has changed and evolved over time. Clearly the management in recent times has not been supplying to its customers what it should have been supplying under contract, and that is what I mean by bad practice. It is not necessarily a breach of the law but it has resulted in Tesco and Burger King moving away from that facility for supply. It is not simply a horsemeat issue and both companies made that clear in their statements. I do not wish to get into the issue of bad management. If there is a breach of the law, then we will get involved.

The reputational issues have caused a good deal of damage and that is rather frustrating for someone such as me and for many other people in the food industry who are trying to build a reputation on the back of good practice.

Many meat traders are also meat suppliers and have a trading arm as well as a production facility. There are also middlemen meat traders who buy and sell on meat, somewhat like meat brokers. They are licensed as businesses but there is no particular licence that our Department gives them to operate. Perhaps that is something we need to consider. Let us wait and see the final results of the investigation.

The inspections are carried out randomly.  Our chief veterinary officer, Martin Blake, is responsible for sending vets to inspect plants on a random basis.  They take random or targeted samples, depending on what we are looking for, on a regular basis.  Both of the companies in the eye of the storm, Silvercrest and the company announced yesterday, are inspected on a monthly basis.  There is, however, a difference between plants that slaughter meat, to which vets are permanently assigned to inspect slaughtering practices and test meat before and after animals are slaughtered, and plants in which only processing is done, such as the aforementioned plants.  We randomly inspect processing plants.

  Beef exports are worth €1.9 billion to Ireland.  Exports of frozen burgers, mainly to the UK, are worth approximately €200 million.  It is a big business, even if it is relatively small in the context of the overall beef sector.  That does not mean it cannot cause reputational damage when things go wrong.