Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

The role of the Department in respect of meat plants is a food safety-animal welfare role. In the context of Covid, we agreed a memorandum of understanding with the HSA to assist it with its inspections. We have people on the ground. I will come back to the Deputy with the specific numbers but we carried out inspections and where there were findings, we reported them to the HSA. In general, we found a reasonably high level of compliance. In addition to that we facilitated serial testing at those plants. There were several rounds of testing of staff with PCR tests once a month. There have been three or four rounds of that and at the last round the level of infection was 0.36% for the staff, which is lower than the current community rate, but it is certainly not something we can take for granted. That PCR testing is still going on in meat plants.

In addition to that we ran a pilot for the development of rapid antigen testing. We felt that meat plants were a perfect environment for running this pilot because we could run the antigen tests against populations that were at the same time being tested for PCR. We now have secured a supply of antigen tests which are available for the industry to test its staff. That is beginning to be rolled out. We have done 2,500 or 3,000 of those tests. If I can I will come back to the Deputy. I am afraid my team could not hear the questions so-----