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

Following on from Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív's comments, I would have grave concerns about any system under which a lump sum would be paid to bring them in because of the risk of incentivising the practice, which would be a problem.

Touching on the point made about microchipping, I heard a story about a garda arriving at a scene where a horse had been knocked down and killed. The garda asked a local who owned the horse, but nobody could find out who owned it.

Somebody asked who would own a dead horse. The same thing applies. It comes back to the point about being reactive or proactive. My next question is for Mr. McGrath. What do the local authorities have to do to get the subvention from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine? That goes back to my earlier point about whether we can go into certain areas where we know there are many horses. It seems logical to me. We are finding many horses that are very distressed or are dead in these situations and, inevitably, they turn out not to be micro-chipped. If we go into an area where there is no problem on a given day and do an on-the-spot check and find that a load of horses are not micro-chipped, can we seize them or does a horse need to be in distress before local authorities can access the money from the Department?