Paul Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses from the Veterinary Council of Ireland and I have a number of questions or statements on which they could elaborate. They arise from the submission to the committee.

I will follow up a very interesting deliberation we had in the past hour with the HPRA.

Something came through very loud and clear on the issue of antiparasitic resistance. I am conscious that the VCI submission is very much based on the antibiotics side. On the antiparasitic side, based on what I have been listening to for the last hour, I wonder whether the product is the problem here, irrespective of whether it is prescribed and administered by a vet, or prescribed and sold by a responsible person or suitably qualified person and administered by the farmer himself? We are engaged in a box-ticking exercise with regard to the EU regulation. We are not going to solve the problem, if there is a problem with antiparasitic resistance, with the products we have available. As I said, it will make absolutely no difference who is or is not prescribing it or administering it if there is not a broader range of product. Based on their submission to us and what we have heard in the last hour, will the VCI representatives comment on that? What do they say about the HPRA task force report, which found, on a Europe-wide basis, that the only area and the only action which had a positive effect in reducing antiparasitic resistance was in Scandinavia, where the action taken was the decoupling of prescribing and dispensing? In other words, the vets prescribed and another agency dispensed. I would like a comment on that because in the other areas that introduced the policy of vet prescription that is proposed here, it did not have the desired effect. In fact, an increase in antiparasitic resistance was recorded.

I was on the previous agriculture committee when the council came before us. We had a lot of debate and deliberation on the veterinary practice ownership issue. The council stood firm on allowing multinationals to buy up and amalgamate small practices. We are where we are on that but with that in mind, if this regulation goes through as currently proposed and we do not take the derogation, are there enough vets in the country to prescribe what is required? Do we have enough vets, veterinary practices and services in rural areas to be able to meet the needs of the farming community, assuming we do not take the derogation?

I wish to give the witnesses, as professionals and as vets, a brief example. It says in the regulation that a veterinary prescription is valid for five days only and also that a veterinary prescription is "limited to the amount required for the treatment concerned". I am using the example of a farmer who thinks he has an issue and calls out the vet. Dung sampling and observation is done. It is a rather large herd and parasites are identified in it, but not in the entire herd. In the VCI representatives' opinion, what does the vet do then, under the new system? Does he give the farmer a prescription to dose all the cattle or does he start doing a full test, so that what he prescribes is limited to the amount required for the treatments concerned? I would like council representatives' professional opinions on that.