Mr. Gerry Neary:

It is fine. It is an important point. The real point is that we are bound by ethics to treat animals even if we are not paid. We do a lot of voluntary work. We do a lot of work with wildlife coming in to us. There is an ethical obligation on us to do it and not to let any animal suffer, but there may be no financial reward for doing it.

Mention was made of how the factory shifts are distributed. There was always an open panel system. Every young veterinarian in the country, including myself when I was young, got on a panel. It was an open system. It was a good system. Then, unilaterally, in 2012, the Department, as part of a public service embargo we would have to assume, decided that it was closing the panels. Until such time as we reached agreement with the Department only two or three weeks ago, that embargo remained. I would say the reopening of the panels will occur for young vets on an as-needed basis. The reason for the as-needed basis rather than the open policy is the zero-hour legislation that will come in. Anybody who went on the panel heretofore took his or her one shift a year or one shift a month and as vets left the panel, the others gradually moved up. Some lads are 20th on a panel before they get a permanent shift. The panels will be opened again but not to the extent where they are wide open because of zero hour legislation which would require that if they got no work, they would have to be paid some money. The status on the panels, from 2012 to 2019, was as a result of that largely public service embargo.

I will just make a few comments from an age perspective on the TB scheme. Sometimes we forget the progress that has been made. Mr. Geraghty referred to it being a human problem. I remember once early in life, an old man spoke to me in Kilbegnet, Creggs. He said that people really do not understand the progress that had been made with the TB eradication - it probably never should have been called an "eradication scheme" - or TB testing scheme in that his job in the early 1950s, as he was one of the few in the parish who had a shotgun, was to go his neighbours' place to shoot the cows who were emaciated and coughing blood. When we are talking about the eradication of TB, except for an odd carrier case, we have never seen TB as it existed in cattle where it was a debilitating disease of considerable economic significance where those animals were infecting other animals and where the milk was also infecting people. We should always be careful. As Deputy Cahill referred to with the brucellosis scheme, one does not forget where one came from. At one stage, we had the brucellosis almost eradicated. When we statistically reached official brucellosis free, OBF, status, we stopped testing. It came at the same time as there was a massive influx of southern cattle into the west for new beef incentives and we absolutely blew brucellosis back out of the water again.

Progress has been made. I would remind Deputy Cahill, only because he was talking about it, about the risk-based assessment. To my recollection, towards the terminal stages of the brucellosis eradication scheme there was a risk-based assessment. As I recall, when I started first anyway, one had a red card, a brown card and a green card for one's cow, depending on her brucellosis status.

Those with red cards could only go into red herds, amber cards could only go into amber or red herds and green cards could go into any herd. Even at that stage of brucellosis, movement was allowed from cleaner herds back to lesser herds but not from high risk herds to lesser risk herds.