Mr. Paul Smyth:

I thank the Chairman and the committee for inviting us to speak. This situation has been going on for years now, for well over 50 years and we are probably no further on now than we were 50 years ago. There is an opportunity now, the Minister has put a group together, and it is important that we move this forward. This has a direct financial impact on farmers as well as an impact on running the business. There is an indirect cost of €55 million to farmers annually in TB testing. Some €27 million is the cost of the actual TB testing, where €7 million is charged in disease levies at factory and processing level. If one includes farmers own labour where a great amount of time is spent in the process of testing, there is a further cost of €20 million. The total amount then is over €50 million. There were 23,000 reactors last year. That is the highest number of reactors we have had since 2009. Over 4,500 herds have been dealing with restrictions as well. When we look at the cost where we are putting the money in, if we look across the Border in Northern Ireland and the UK, there is no direct cost to farmers. That, in itself, needs to be ironed out. Farmers need to be compensated for both the time and the effort that they are putting in.

How do we deal with this in order to move it forward? It is absolutely essential that farmers and farm representative bodies are involved in the design and implementation of the programme that will deal with this. We have had many false dawns. As I said already, we want to get it right this time in recognition of the labour and contribution of farmers to the programme.

A letter was sent out to farmers last year. We need to revisit that herd risk letter in which herds were being categorised. We need to look at that again and, obviously, we will need to look at this idea of bringing in a pre-movement test and what that will do.

One of the key fundamentals, however, is that we need a proper meaningful wildlife programme. If we are not going to tackle the source of the problem then how will we resolve the issue? It is absolutely essential that everybody gets serious around the table and comes up with a proper programme around wildlife.

We also need proper investigation when there is an outbreak in an area, and people from the Department should be out on the ground working in conjunction with farmers to see and identify where the problem is coming from. I will leave it at that for the moment.