Mr. Tim Drea:

I welcome the opportunity to put this on the record because the Senator is not alone in his understanding of the Zilpaterol issue. Zilpaterol is a beta-agonist that is illegal in Europe. It is used in the USA, South Africa and other countries as a growth promoter for beef cattle. When discovered in Ireland, it is treated as a food or feed safety incident, which triggers our incident management plan. The Department's response is governed by the official control of foodstuffs regulation, namely, Regulation (EU) 2017/625, which requires all member states to have the capacity to respond to these types of incidents. In practice, all the relevant staff in the Department, the Food Safety Authority and associated agencies would have been brought together in a small group. This all happened over hours and days so it was all done very quickly; as quickly as the laboratory results could be generated. It is a requirement of the official controls regulation that the animal feed industry has full traceability from raw material to finished product and out to the customer, and Ireland has that. Once this issue was identified, Department staff would have gone to the feed mill, gone through its feed milling process and sampled the raw materials, and then gone back to the importer. Within a very short period - from memory it was a matter of a few days - the origin of the problem was discovered.

The origin of the problem was a molasses mixing plant in South Africa. It was the first shipment from that plant to Europe and that plant had a mixing system that allowed it to incorporate Zilpaterol into molasses as a growth promoter in beef cattle, which can be done legitimately in South Africa. That is the practice in America as well. Unfortunately, an importer, a Belgian multinational company, bought molasses from that plant. The level of Zilpaterol identified in the samples was very low. We got samples and tested feed and raw materials. We communicated with the European Commission and other agencies. The level of Zilpaterol in both the feed and the raw material was low enough for us to conclude that there was no feed or food safety issue, which is our focus. However, the fact is Zilpaterol was there and that is also an equine doping issue. We and the equine industry have no tolerance for Zilpaterol. You cannot have it so when it is there our focus is around food and feed safety. We were satisfied that it was not a food or feed safety issue. All the product was withdrawn and taken out of the feed chain as a precaution. The conclusion of that investigation is that this was what is described in the legislation as a contained isolated incident of external cause. We are absolutely satisfied that this was not deliberate. There was no logic to the possibility that there could have been a deliberate cross-contamination here and there was no line of sight between the raw material importer and the end user. The zilpaterol came from South Africa in a load of molasses.