John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Mr. O’Driscoll said earlier that he could not understand why he approached the Department in the way he did to slaughter the animals in the manner in which he did. It is fairly understandable. My understanding is that he went to a couple of abattoirs and they would not take the animals for the obvious reason that they probably said they did not want any potentially contaminated pigs going into the food chain and they did not really know what they were dealing with. Ultimately, when it came right down to it, the Department constructively made that individual slaughter those pigs himself. It was a question of money as well. It was probably the case that if he brought the pigs to an abattoir that was willing to take them, it probably would have cost him an awful lot of money to have the 4,000 pigs slaughtered. It was probably the cheaper option at the time, once the decree was issued by the Department to the farmer in question. Is that fair enough?