Mr. David Graham:

I thank members for the questions and for the recognition of the progress that has been made, particularly in the BVD programme.

It is fair to say that despite that progress, as I think all of the questions have indicated, the progress has been slower than anticipated. It is recognised that the primary reason for this has been the retention of persistently infected, PI, animals, albeit by a minority of herd owners. The implementation group has sought consistently over the years of the programme thus far to reinforce and refine. There is recognition of the additional measures that have been brought in this year, including notification of neighbours in order that they can put in place biosecurity measures, more prompt imposition of restrictions, refinement of the financial supports and the timescales available for them. We are very hopeful that we will see further benefit from those measures through the course of 2017. On foot of the partial introduction of a number of those measures in 2016, we have seen a marked improvement in addressing retention issues. The rate of progress of reduction of PIs in 2016 was much greater than in previous years as that retention issue has been addressed. Looking to the future within the programme, one piece of work that has been very useful for the implementation group and that increasingly is informing its thinking has been the development of a national level model of the disease within the country. It allows us to interrogate that model and to ask a series of different questions about the impact of different measures.

On times to eradication, the outputs of that modelling indicate that is feasible by 2020. The challenge remains for all stakeholders to continue to do the right thing. There are increasing measures and there is the scope for the implementation group to agree and to seek more stringent measures still to address those. To some extent, some of those still remain at farm level and need to be implemented there.

I will address where we are with IBR briefly. For each of the programmes Animal Health Ireland has, it works through or gets its scientific input from technical working groups that support the programmes. The IBR technical working group has been working initially on developing resources that operate at individual farm level and is now moving forward to seek to put a programme or options for a programme in place at national level. Within the EU there is legislation that puts certain constraints on the shape of our programme if we wish to have it approved by the Commission. The implementation group undertook a study visit around 12 months ago to look at programmes which have approval in Belgium, as well as the Dutch programme, with a view to trying to identify the most cost-effective way that we can take that forward. That work is coming close to completion at this stage and can then move to the next stage. There is also ongoing work within Teagasc, looking at the disease cost to inform the other side of that cost-benefit discussion. The goal over the next months is to bring the two elements of that together and to bring that forward for consultation using the same model as we followed with BVD at the start of that programme. I will end my remarks there unless there any further or follow-up questions.