Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor More for his very illuminating and learned paper. A few months ago, in 2018, veterinary officials made their presentation, and I suggested that we would be talking about this in 2040 and 2045. I was wrong; I will be long dead, as will many others. We will still be going about this issue in 2060. The professor might be familiar with the River Shannon. People spoke about draining that river back in the 1950s, coincidentally at the same time the TB eradication programme commenced. There is a better chance of the Shannon being drained than TB being eradicated. We have already spent the guts of €8 billion on this, and the Department indicated recently it would take another billion euro. The Department is wrong. Britain leaving the EU is going to cost €12 billion. We will far exceed that sum by the time this scheme is completed. The reason is obvious. The professor has identified it very clearly. Other people have skirted around the issue but he did not. The programme in place was merely a containment programme. It was never supposed to eliminate the disease. This vindicates a view I heard back in the 1970s, when I was at college. The programme was never going to rid the system of TB. On the vaccination of badgers, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine must run off and get permission from the National Parks and Wildlife Service to vaccinate a certain number of them. There is no widespread vaccination of badgers; it is very controlled. Am I correct about that? I thought I heard evidence from the Department on the last occasion that it could only carry out so many such vaccinations with the approval of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. That attempt to deal with the disease went down the drain.

Deputy Cahill is correct. The vaccine programme produced false positives and false negatives. There were also residual cases where TB is not detected in the herd at all. There is no chance this programme will eradicate it. There was a better chance of winning the EuroMillions last week. Ordinary people are looking at this and wondering why we are spending so much money. Deputy Cahill has said that it has cost the farmers a great deal of money, but a great deal of State money has been spent on this as well.

Can the professor tell us how Australia eradicated bovine TB? The professor is from Australia, where there was last an outbreak in 2002. It has a different system, but it also has very large amount of animals, along with possible vectors, carriers and hosts. Are we sure that the potential carriers are the cattle themselves, along with badgers and deer? Is that the extent of the potential carriers in our system, or is there something hidden that we perhaps do not know about? I know about the concept of the reproduction ratio - I studied it once - but with the number of secondary cases, even with the vaccination, the ratio is barely below one.

I do not know where this will end. If I went to college again, I would become a vet as vets will be in demand forever, not just for border control but for everything else.