Mr. Tomás Bourke:

On the mart boards issue, as the Senator will be aware, it was a proposal from the original TB forum that was implemented by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine without any agreement or discussion with farm organisations. It was subsequently removed from the process. Unfortunately, however, as the previous speaker outlined, the categorisation the Department carried out of all the herds in this country remains, given that it continues to be published at the top of our annual TB test letter. The information continues to be there despite the fact there are significant issues with data protection, which was breached, from our perspective. We lodged a complaint with the relevant office to have the matter investigated. Farmers' private data, based on historical trading interactions with other herd owners, have been communicated throughout the country unnecessarily, with a severe impact on the potential for many herds to have further trading arrangements with those farmers.

The Senator asked what the alternative is. There is no a need for an alternative because devaluing farmers' stock for a prolonged period of five to six years, having undergone the burden of a TB restriction in the first instance for a period of anything from six months to two years, does nothing to eradicate TB. We have considerable problems with TB on the 4% farmers where it exists, but TB remains a low-prevalence disease. The vast majority of TB episodes on farms relates to two animals or fewer, and we have to bear that in mind when we talk about controls and the appropriateness of controls in controlling the disease.

The other substantive point is that TB is primarily a disease of older animals, with two thirds of TB reactors in this country coming from the cow population, yet our entire agriculture sector is based on the trade of younger animals. This crude approach by the Department to eradicate TB, which has no basis in science, has had the impact of devaluing 75% of the animals that are traded in this country, which were at an extremely low risk of ever being found with TB. It was an unnecessary approach and it does not require an alternative. It is not part of the current programme but, at this week's TB forum, it was again raised by the Department as a proposal for enhancements to the 2023 programme before we have fully implemented the agreed improvements and enhancements to the current programme from last year, particularly in respect of wildlife.

The herd categorisation does not contribute to the eradication of disease and has no place in the Irish TB programme because it fails to recognise the unique dynamic of the Irish farm infrastructure and the high dependence of the vast majority of farmers in this country on trade, whereby weanlings are born on small-scale farms in the peripheral areas of the country that are subsequently traded to larger farms for feeding, and whereby dairy farms need to move calves from their farms to sustain and maintain the production systems we have. Neither science nor the figures back up any further advance in the devaluing of our herds through this blacklisting approach and we continue to reject it.